One Thousand Chestnut Trees | Asian American Bookview

One Thousand Chestnut Trees
by Mira Stout
Riverhead, New York, 1999, 347 pp, $14 (Paper)
A Corean American returns to Korea to retraces her family's heritage.
EXCERPT

t was winter in Vermont. Beyond my window,the pines would have bristled sparsely against the hushed white snow. The gray, swelling sky would have been as vast and lonely as a northern sea. But I can't recall Hong-do's arrival. His presence was ghostly then, so tentative that he scarcely left an imprint. Yet now, years later, when I remember that emptiness, Hong-do's face follows.
     My uncle from Seoul came to stay with us when I was just fourteen, my first year of boarding school. His jet eyes, wide-boned pallor, and shock hair gave him an outward boldness, but he was actually quite shy. Although I'd met my mother's Korean friends, Hong-do was different, more foreign somehow; pungent and unfiltered.
     Even gestures required translating; Hong-do's sneeze was a violent "YA-shee" rather than a tame "Ker-CHOO." And when he was in a hurry, he walked in Korean too, lightly trotting, arms stationary and body canted forward. He rather stuck out in our redneck town.
     My mother must have looked equally Oriental, but I noticed less -- she was a mother, already a separate species. Besides, they didn't look alike. My uncle's face was paler, and round like a moon. There was something remote and masked about him, as if he were stranded in his skin.

Despite our kinship, I felt little for my new relation then. Though he was young enough to be a brother (I hadn't any siblings), no reassuring sympathy for him welled up, and to my alarm, no rescuing tug of filial loyalty helped me to pretend otherwise. Hong-do was a spaceling to me. The rapid guttural language of clucking, hacking noises that he and my mother spoke sounded ugly and comical to my teenage ears, separating us like barbed wire.
As a child, I had refused to learn Korean. I'd even blocked out most of my mother's worn stories of Seoul, which were as unreal as fairy tales, but with tragic endings. The gilded family sagas ended in divided lands, ruined gold mines, betrayals and torture at the hands of Japanese invaders, even before the beginning of the catastrophic Korean War.

ASIAN AIR ISSUES FORUM | CONTACT US

© 1999-2003 GoldSea
No part of the contents of this site may be reproduced without prior written permission.