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To those bold young doctors at Mercy Hospital who would inquire as to her status-was she married, or did she have a boyfriend? they wanted to know-Yi-Yiing always said, to their surprise, “I live with the writer Da
Once, at a party, someone who worked at Mercy Hospital said to Da
“What girlfriend?” Da
“Yi-Yiing-she’s Chinese, a nurse at-”
“She’s my dad’s girlfriend,” the writer quickly said.
“Oh-”
“What’s going on with Yi-Yiing?” Da
“I don’t question Yi-Yiing, Daniel. She doesn’t question me,” the cook pointed out. “And isn’t she terrific with Joe?” his dad asked him. Both of them knew very well that this was the same point Da
And what was it that was wrong about that house? It had been big enough for them all; that wasn’t it. There were enough bedrooms so that everyone could have slept separately; Youn used one of the extra bedrooms as a place to write, and for all her things. For a woman over thirty who’d had no children and endured an incomprehensible Korean divorce-at least it was “incomprehensible” in her novel-in-progress, or so Da
“I’m a student,” she’d said to Da
IN THE FALL OF ’73, when Joe was starting third grade, the cook kept a crate of apples on the back porch of their Iowa City house. The porch overlooked a narrow, paved alley; it ran the length of the long row of houses that fronted Court Street. The alley didn’t appear to be used for anything, except for picking up garbage. Only an occasional slow-moving car passed, and-more often, even constantly-kids on bicycles. There was some loose sand or gravel on the little-used pavement, which meant the kids could practice skids on their bikes. Joe had fallen off his bike in that back alley. Yi-Yiing had cleaned the scrape on the boy’s knee.
A porch, off the kitchen, faced the alley, and something was eating the apples that the cook left out on the porch-a raccoon, Da
All Da
“I don’t know!” the boy wailed. “It was white and pink-it looked awful! What was it?”
“A possum,” Da
That night, when Joe fell asleep, Da
Youn had stood in the open doorway of the boy’s bedroom; she’d watched Da
“He was too startled and too scared to know,” Da
Then again, if one could believe her story (or her novel), her success in obtaining a divorce from her husband-most important, in getting him to initiate the allegedly complicated procedure-was due to her failure to get pregnant and have a child. That was her novel’s tortuous plot: how her husband presumed she was trying to get pregnant, when all along she’d been taking birth-control pills and using a diaphragm-she was doing all she could not to get pregnant, and to never have a child.
Youn was writing her novel in English, not Korean, and her English was excellent, Da
The husband-ultimately, Da
It didn’t help that, in bed at night, Youn told Da
Shouldn’t the fictional husband, the cold-blooded-killer executive in her novel, have a different name from her actual ex-husband? Da
“My previous life is over,” Youn answered him darkly. She did not seem to associate sex with duty now, though Da
Youn was extraordinarily neat with her few belongings. She even kept her toilet articles in the small bathroom attached to the unused bedroom where she wrote. Her clothes were in the closet of that bedroom, or in the lone chest of drawers that was there. Once, when Youn was out, Da
Da