The Door to Bitterness

18

The Uichon mama-san had told me that when Miss Yun’s older brother refused to register her first child-her smiling daughter-on the family register, Miss Yun registered by herself as the head of her own family. No father, no grandparents, nothing. This is unusual in Korea, because the mantle of “head of the family” passes from father to oldest son to younger sons, to first daughter, to younger daughters, and finally to mother-in that order.

When one family member is seen to be shaming the rest of the family, they are sometimes banished from their hallowed place on the register. They’re forced to return to their kohyang, the ancestral home, and request a new family register under their name alone. Apparently, that’s what Miss Yun had done.

The family register the records clerk placed in front of me was the register where Miss Yun, the mother, was recorded. At the top were the stern-faced black and white photos of her father-the smiling woman’s grandfather. Below, Miss Yun’s mother-the smiling woman’s grandmother. Both of them were marked deceased. Listed next were three sons. The first two were also deceased. I checked the dates. They had both died during the Korean War, a number of years before their parents. The only surviving son was Yun Guang-min. The photo showed him as a child of twelve years, stern-faced and sullen.

Yun Guang-min was older than his sister, Miss Yun, and had to be in late middle-age by now. His face was square, with high cheekbones, and bore little resemblance to the smooth contoured lines of his younger sister’s face.

Miss Yun was the only daughter listed. She was a late child. Of all the faces on the family register, hers was the only beautiful one in the bunch.

“Seen enough?” Ernie asked.

“One more thing.” I spoke to the clerk, explaining in Korean what I wanted. He nodded, took the ledger back, and returned it to the archives down in the basement.

“What is it now?” Ernie said.

“You’ll see.”

When the clerk returned, he brought a newer book, already open to a page that had the photo of a now-adult Yun Guang-min. Below him was his wife, a cute heart-faced young woman, and below that, four children. After his older brothers and parents passed away, Yun Guang-min opened his own family register with himself as head of the family. By tradition, his unmarried sister should’ve been listed on his register but, of course, she wasn’t. Even Ernie understood why.

“His sister’s children were half-Miguk,” he said. “He didn’t want anything to do with her.”

“Right. He turned his back on all of them. And did nothing to help when she was working the streets and slowly dying of tuberculosis.”

Yun Guang-min’s treatment of his younger sister was harsh, no question about it, but not all that unusual. Sure, most people continue to support their daughter or sister, even if they’re pregnant with a GI’s baby. But other Koreans, the more traditional ones, didn’t always act with such equanimity. There’d been cases, recorded by the Koreans themselves, in which a woman with a GI baby had been hanged by her father or brothers. The police, when they investigated, often wrote the whole thing off as suicide.

“I suppose,” Ernie said, “this uncle will be the next victim on the smiling woman’s hit list.”

“Maybe.”

“We’d better warn him.”

“No need,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s already been warned.”

“Already warned? How?”

“Look at the face again.”

I pointed to the photograph of Yun Guang-min. The same high cheekbones and square face, but in this second family register, instead of being a boy of about twelve, he was a man in his early thirties.

“Imagine the face as a middle-aged man,” I said. “Imagine gray hair, more wrinkles, a grim expression.”

Ernie worked on it for a while, and then his eyes widened. “Holy shit,” he said.

I thanked the records clerk, slid the ledger across the counter, and Ernie and I trotted outside to the lot in front of the Yoju Hall of Records. Ernie fired up the jeep.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I know the way.”

We wound through back country roads, heading west. The afternoon was once again gray and overcast. At an intersection, one sign pointed north toward Seoul, another pointed west toward Inchon.

Ernie turned toward Inchon and shifted into high gear.

Blackjack dealers looked up from their tables as Ernie and I waded across the carpeted floor of the Olympos Casino. I wanted to talk to the smiling woman’s uncle, question him about the whereabouts of his nephew and niece, and maybe- just maybe-head off the next killing. The door of the cashier’s cage was locked, but I pounded on it and told the cashiers inside that I wanted to talk to Yun Guang-min, the owner of the casino.

Their eyes widened, and they conferred with one another, and while they mumbled, the manager, Mr. Bok, appeared out of nowhere. He smiled and bowed and told me that unfortunately Mr. Yun Guang-min was not available. I asked him why. He said that he was currently engaged in a banquet entertaining honored guests.

“Where?” I asked.

Bok just kept repeating that Yun Guang-min was unavailable.

Ernie was fed up. He reached for Bok, grabbed his shoulders, and while the casino manager’s mouth opened in shock, Ernie reached inside the man’s expensive suit jacket and pulled out a leather-bound notebook. He handed it to me.

Bok struggled to grab it back, but Ernie held him off.

I riffled through the pages. It was an appointment book.