1: What was Sun-hee’s Japanese name and why did it sound strange to her?
Answers
Answer:
What was Sun-hee’s Japanese name and why did it sound strange to her?
“It’s only a rumour,” Abuji said as I cleared the table.
“They’ll never carry it out.”
My father wasn’t talking to me, of course. He was talking
to Uncle and my brother, Tae-yul, as they sat around the
low table after dinner, drinking tea.
I wasn’t supposed to listen to men’s business, but I
couldn’t help it. It wasn’t really my fault. Ears don’t close
the way eyes do.
I worked slowly. First I scraped the scraps of food and
dregs of soup into an empty serving dish. Then I stacked
the brass bowls – quietly, so they wouldn’t clang against
one another. Finally, I moved around the table and began
putting the bowls through the little low window between
the sitting room and the kitchen. The kitchen was built
three steps down from the central courtyard, and the sitting room three steps up. From the window I could reach
a shelf in the kitchen. I put the bowls on the shelf one at a
time, arranging them in a very straight line.
The longer I stayed in the room, the more I’d hear.
Uncle shook his head. “I don’t know, Hyungnim,” he
said, disagreeing respectfully. “They’re masters of organisation – if they want this done, you can be sure they will find
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a way to do it. And I fear what will happen if they do. Our
people will not stand for it. I am afraid there will be terrible
trouble—”
Abuji cleared his throat to cut off Uncle’s words. He’d
noticed me kneeling by the table with the last of the bowls
in my hands; I was listening so hard that I’d stopped moving. Hastily, I shoved the bowl through the window and left
the room, sliding the paper door closed behind me.
What rumour? What was going to happen? What kind of
trouble?
When I asked Tae-yul later, he said it was none of my
business. That was his answer a lot of the time. It always
made me want to clench my fists and stamp my foot and
hit something.
Nobody ever told me anything. I always had to find out for
myself. But at least I was good at it.
You had to do two opposite things: be quiet and ask
questions. And you had to know when to be quiet and who
to ask.
When was easy. I was supposed to be quiet most of the
time. The youngest in the family was never supposed to
talk when older people were talking. And girls weren’t supposed to talk much anyway, not when men or boys were
around. So listening was easy for me; I’d done it all my life.
But lots of times I didn’t learn what I wanted to know by
listening. That was when I had to ask questions.
I could have asked my mother, Omoni, when we were
doing housework together. But I’d learned that it was useless