Mid 21st Century
I can't remember a time I wasn't drawing circles.
Mother saved them all, of course. On a hot morning in late autumn, many years after Father destroyed the world, she showed them to me.
It would be scorching soon, but Mother insisted on getting some air. I helped her over the threshold to the small balcony of our flat, high over Vancouver, and steadied her the few steps it took to get to our small, bamboo table.
She shooed away the soot with a white linen handkerchief, gripped in her free hand, and laid flat an old black portfolio with the other. I wiped off two chairs and helped her settle in, the taste of the air sharp and metallic. The rising sun flared from behind the empty block of flats across the road, stinging my eyes closed. A blue-green afterimage of dragons flashed beneath my eyelids, and I blinked them open, fighting an urge to sneeze.
As she unzipped and opened the cracked vinyl cover, the dirty orange sunlight spilled into the open portfolio. Nestled in the black velvet like an oyster pearl, perfectly bundled and tied with a lavender lace ribbon, was what looked like every drawing I had ever made.
That can't be, can it? I thought, as I watched Mother carefully loosen the knot.
Many of the pages were roughly drawn on cheap, blue-lined wood-pulp paper, torn out of my composition books, proof of my childish boredom in language class. I felt a sudden shame I was so easily distracted then.
"Look at all of this effort," Mother said kindly. "Do you remember how you'd spend hours and hours drawing these? You were a girl possessed."
I didn't say anything at first. I was not entirely comfortable with what she meant by possessed, and it made me uneasy.
"I don't remember making those," I lied casually, looking away. "I was so young then."
But I did remember. Allof it.
I remembered our one, small room in Wonsan with the large, low table, around which we'd eat, read, and even argue sometimes. It was the table beside which my brother, Joo Chen, and I would sleep, and the one that held the screen we would watch for hours and hours. It was the table on which Father once pounded his fist so hard I was afraid he would break Mother's little vase, the one she arranged every day with fresh wildflowers or sprigs of wild mint or whatever else she could find.
That table was literally the center of our lives, and I hadn't thought about it in years. Strange how it came to mind just then.
I wonder what happened to it?I thought.
I hoped someone was still using it. I hated to think of it as discarded or broken up for firewood, as so often happened to furniture in Wonsan. Or worse, lost forever.
Like our lives back then.
Ah, Wonsan. I could still smell the fish Mother would steam for breakfast when we were lucky enough to have it, and I remembered how, as we sat around that table laughing and eating and spitting out bones, the air would be so thick with the salty, fishy smell you'd think the whole of the East Sea was in the room with us.
I could draw for hours at that table and knew every bump and all the cracks. Unconsciously, I would caress the wood surface with one hand like I was petting it, searching the texture with my fingertips while my other hand was busy drawing, as if on its own. And I remembered my green cardboard box, full of pencils, sitting on that table, and how it would rattle as the military lorries rumbled along the well-rutted dirt road just outside the wall, as I huddled against the winter cold and drew circles.
But of everything, it was the light that I remembered most. Back then, we welcomed the morning sun. It poured through the little casement windows at the top of the concrete block wall of our flat, all yellow and warm as it moved down and across that table over the slow course of the day, changing the angle of the pencil's shadow as I drew.
At night, if I was still drawing, Joo Chen would tease me, blowing at the candle, making it flicker, throwing big ugly shadows across the wall. Sometimes I'd cry if the candle went out, and he'd crawl into my lap, remorseful, cooing my name.
The memory of my brother and those lost days, so long ago, brought a welling of tears.
"Well, I remember, even if you don't," Mother said, snapping me back to the moment.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, pretending to shield them from the merciless sun.
"Around and around," she sighed, "whipping your thin little arm and snapping your wrist so hard I thought it would break. Sometimes you'd draw for hours at a time without even looking at the paper, and other times you'd just stare at the blank page for minutes, as if planning every square millimeter before you'd begin. It was such intensity for so young a girl."
We sat together quietly for a long while as Mother turned the pages, one by one. Each sheet felt like bumping into an old friend I hadn't seen in years, and all the happy memories of our innocent days together would suddenly come flooding back.
Slipped in between the rough pulp pencil sketches was a precise ink drawing made on a sheet of pearl-white rice paper, as thin as smoke. Then, several loose chalk drawings made on perfect squares of red-colored origami paper, flattened, but with the creases still crisp.
All the folded magic that came undone at my hands just so I could draw circles on paper, I thought, sadly.
Many of my drawings were richly detailed, and almost all were filled with hundreds of overlapping circles and ovals, creating a haunting sense of depth and dimension.
Did I really make these? I thought. It didn't seem possible. They were complex and compelling, and the closer I looked, the more deeply they lured me in.
Then we came to one drawing in particular, one I remembered clearly. Yes, there were the wrinkles I made when I folded it in haste that night in Father's lab, shoving it deep into my pocket as the fire raged around us.
Mother watched me carefully. She seemed to know of its power, too. She held the paper out at arm's length for a better look. Without her long-lost glasses, she squinted at first, to make out the details, and after a respectful moment, offered it to me with both hands.
Suddenly, I had an overwhelming feeling, like when you return home after a long, long journey and you're so happy to see everyone but they just want to talk and talk, and you're so utterly exhausted from traveling all you want to do is to sleep.
I wasn't sure I had the strength for this.
But I couldn't resist either.
I took the drawing from her with both hands. My eyes unfocused. Slowly, in the patterns of the intersecting arcs, in the depths of the deepening design, the faces began to form.
To me, they had always looked quite three-dimensional, like seeing patterns in clouds on a pleasant afternoon. On the left, a boy's face formed. He was singing. No, wait. Or was he shouting? Yes, shouting about something. A dog's head was trying to form on the right, a fish was swimming away from me at the bottom. And I could tell the dragons would appear soon, if I let them.
I used to talk to my drawings, as if they could hear me, and sometimes I was sure they were talking back, trying to tell me something important. But I couldn't understand the words and that frightened me when I was young.
I wonder,I thought, can they hear me still?
Then, as if in answer, the sad old woman with the black face-mask and fiery eyes appeared, hiding in a corner of an intricate mass of overlapping lines. She turned. I could see her plainly now, but heard no sound.
Still not speaking to me?I thought at her.
No reply.
Well fine, then!I thought, a little louder, bitter but pretending not to care.
Every so often over the years, I would see her, in the cracking plaster of our crumbling walls, perhaps, or in the swirls of soot deposited overnight on every exposed outdoor surface. But she'd been silent for years, this woman. Deep down I hoped she might speak to me one more time. I neededher to, as if to prove nothing more than I didn't imagine it all.
These drawings were the last bit of evidence—of my youth, of my innocence, of my power—preserved from the sun and soot and a world lost for decades, lovingly, by my distant and ferocious and warm and wonderful Mother.
I stole a glance at her. She looked much older in the morning light, her once-beautiful face sagging, her skin etched with lines of age.
She looked up from the drawings, saw me staring and smiled.
I understand now how very difficult it must have been to get paper and pencils and brushes and inks like the ones I drew with as a little girl. Someone must have been very special to get such treasures. I always thought it was Father, but now, suddenly, I wasn't so sure.
"Thank you," I whispered.
In Korea, we always whispered.
Until the day we escaped.