The Calligrapher's Daughter by Eugenia Kim Read Free Book Online Page B

actual day, felt like a special blessing. She bowed her head, and the bun at the back of her neck reflected blue highlights in the sun. “We receive the bounty of your blessings, merciful Father, and are grateful. Amen.”
    I touched the rose petal lightly and it rocked like a miniature cradle. My feet began kicking again, flashes of white toes back and forth.
    She stood. “Let’s go, it’s almost time.”
    To show something of my happiness, I held her hand tightly all the way through the neighborhoods and up the hill.
    We approached the school, a long building of orange-brown brick with evenly spaced metal-framed glass windows. “I won’t go farther,” said Mother. “See if you can walk at least part of the way home with someone. Be well-mannered and respect your teacher.”
    I turned, panic rising, my braids lashing my shoulders.
    She stooped to look calmly into my eyes. “Perhaps I’ll send someone to get you later.” Her fingers lingered on my shoulder. “The neighbor’s boy, Hansu. He won’t mind.”
    I gripped my lunch tied in the square of cloth I’d sewn and decorated with my own ivy pattern. “Thank you, Umma-nim, but I will walk home myself.” I turned to enter the school’s varnished double doors and felt the departure of warmth when my mother’s hand dropped from my shoulder.

Secret Flags

    WINTER, EARLY 1919
    I WOKE TO AN UNFAMILIAR RASP—THE FRONT DOOR SLIDING OPEN and shut. Since my room was next to the vestibule, I sleepily wondered why I’d never really heard the door before. How easily something so common could go unnoticed! In other seasons, humming insects, nocturnal creatures crying, breezes swishing through trees, or leaves scratching the courtyard masked the sound of the door. But heavy new snow had wrapped the night in deep stillness. I heard my father giving instructions to someone outside and opened my eyes.
    Easing out of bed, I saw that no lamp burned in my mother’s room down the hall, meaning it was unusually late. Moonrise marked the beginning of a woman’s private time, and long after I went to bed, shestayed up to sew, read, or write letters. I cracked my shutter open. Two silhouettes, outlined crisply against the snow like shadow puppets, headed toward the gate. I dimly heard a rattle of iron and wood when the bar was lifted and the latch released, then the sounds in reverse when Byungjo closed the gate. He went into the cold gatehouse where he’d await Father’s return. My face chilled, I crept into my quilts, sleepless with curiosity. What seemed like hours later, I woke to sounds of my father’s snow-crunching footsteps, then his shoes shuffling off in the entryway as he quietly, and surprisingly, hummed the Doxology.
    Once alerted, I heard my father over the next several weeks go out in darkness with increasing frequency. It was especially peculiar because in winter, except for church, he rarely left the estate. And since my mother hadn’t attended church lately—too noticeably pregnant to be seen in public—he hardly went out at all. I longed for answers, but I’d learned well how to suppress my inquisitiveness, particularly on matters related to him. With my father, I was like that raspy sliding door—always around but noticed only when something was awry, such as when I dropped a cup, spoke before thinking or skipped on the flagstones.
    LATER THAT WINTER in February, the moon a strand of blue in a cold starlit sky, I sprawled on the bedroom floor with my favorite activity: filling thick pads of cheap paper with vocabulary in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and an occasional English word in crooked letters. The courtyard rang with dripping thaw, loudly punctuated by sheets of ice crashing from rooftops onto the flagstones—a noisy harbinger of an early spring. My mother stopped at my door and I immediately sat in a more ladylike position, but she only said to come quietly to help with something.
    In her sitting room, ghostly twin trails rose from two lamps