Year of Impossible Goodbyes Read Free Page B

through another day. They bowed to Mother in silence, and Mother watched with concern as their weary gray figures disappeared into the liberation of darkness.

    Mother, Aunt, and Kisa then went into the factory to put the socks in neat piles for the Japanese merchants and police. Inchun and I busied ourselves putting heavy blankets over the rice-paper paneled doors of our room. We lit a candle and in the small pool of dancing light, we looked at Grandfather's Chinese books and Mother's book of American fairy tales. Then I started to read aloud from one of our books written in Korean script,
Hangul.
Mother joined us later with a pile of socks that needed mending before the morning, and listened to me read to Inchun. She carefully checked all the work done that day, for she didn't want any of the girls to be in trouble with the police.
    Soon, Inchun got tired of listening to me read and started dozing. His books fell from his little hands, his mouth fell open, and he began to snore softly.
    I kept reading and tried hard to stay awake until Mother was finished with her work. I watched her at night as intently as I watched my Grandfather in the morning. She took off her gray outfit and put on her long white gown. Then she reached back to pull out the tarnished pin that held her braided hair in a large twisted knot at the nape of her neck. When Mother pulled out the little silver pin, her long braided hair came tumbling down like a big heavy rope. It almost touched the floor as she sat on her knees. When she finished unbraiding her hair, she slowly combed the wavy mass. In her white night gown, with her long wavy hair framing her face, she looked like an entirely different person. It was easy to see how Mother had once been the town beauty as the sock girls had said.

    While she quietly combed the mass of wavy hair, I played with her tarnished silver pin. Though it looked like a cheap piece of metal, it was actually a beautifully crafted silver hairpin. When I looked closely, I could see a multitude of embossed little roses and small birds flying. I touched the pin with my finger tips and felt the grooves of the tiny rose petals and the little bumps of the birds' wings. I held it in my palm, and reveled in its cool smoothness. I tossed it into the air and caught it again.
    "Mother," I asked, "why not shine it so that all these birds and rose petals can sparkle in the sunlight? It's so pretty."
    Mother sighed and said, "It is beautiful, isn't it? It was done by a silversmith for my mother when I was little. Both the silversmith and my mother died in a fire set by the Japanese soldiers. But somehow I managed to find it on the ground when I returned to the site of my old home. It was buried in the mud, but it caught my eye for it shone so brilliantly in the sun. I want to keep it as long as I can, and if it were polished, Captain Narita and his lieutenants might notice it and take it away. We would be in trouble for not having offered it long ago for the melting pot."

    As I stared sadly at the pin in my palm, Mother brushed my hair from my forehead. "When the war is over and the Japanese leave, you can polish it and you can fix my hair with it. For now hide the books away and blow the candle out. We must sleep and save the candle for tomorrow night."

Chapter Two
    One hot, muggy day in June, while Inchun and I sat working on the tube socks, Aunt Tiger and Mother told us they had a plan. We were going to have a special surprise celebration for Haiwon's sixteenth birthday. Aunt Tiger insisted she would make a visit to my sister Theresa's convent to get one of those fancy books the nuns decorated with pictures of saints and angels. That would surely be something very special for Haiwon. Mother hesitated. It was her daughter, after all. "I'll go myself," she said. "You don't know the back route as I do."

    The convent was in the countryside just outside of Pyongyang City. It was only twenty minutes away by train, but the Japanese