Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim Page B

death is something someone invented somewhere. I am lost as to where those other babies went.
    My mother sighs over the deaths she did not witness. She is the lucky one. She came last—the youngest of the nine. She survived and grew into a beautiful woman, a wife, a mother. Four others never made it. As a mother, saying these things aloud scares her, and she pulls me toward her and squeezes me very hard as though she is afraid of losing me too. I don’t like this moment. I don’t like the fear in her eyes, but I keep on asking so that it will distract her and she will finish telling the story, although this story has no ending. A loop that does not complete a circle. A gap that will never be filled.
    All she recalls is the sudden chaos, her mother and her siblings in a great hurry. Her eldest brother takes charge. He is only seventeen, but with his father missing, he is the man of the house, telling his mother to get some rice balls ready for their train journey. It is decided that they will first go to Suwon, nineteen miles outside of Seoul, where they have a relative, and from there, they will make their way to Busan, where her father is. She is soon picked up, in the arms of her eldest brother. The other three children follow, each with a parcel of things on his or her back. My grandmother gazes at the house one last time, afraid she might never set eyes on it again. It will be three years before she does, but she does not know that as she reluctantly turns away to begin the long walk to the train that will take them to safety.
    You see, it was all farmland up there in the hills, a good hour walk to Seoul Station.
    Tucked beneath the rocky Bukaksan (Mount Bukak) towering above and adjacent to the Gyeongbokgung imperial palace and the Blue House, where the president resides, my mother’s childhood neighborhood of Samcheong-dong was long ignored as a sleepy corner where public transportation was inconvenient and the daily patrol by armed guards made even a casual walk difficult. Although the view from there has always been spectacular, Samcheong-dong, for a long time, remained a poor cousin to wealthier nearby districts.
    Samcheong-dong today bears no resemblance to the forgotten hills of my mother’s recollection. In 2009, when I was living in Seoul on a fellowship, I took tennis lessons in Samcheong Park, about a hundred yards from where my mother’s childhood home had been. Nobody lived there anymore. My uncle had long since sold the family house and moved to the suburbs as the neighborhood began to attract real estate developers. Many of its run-down hanok s (traditional Korean shingle-tile roofed houses) had been converted into cafés and boutiques, and the area had become one of the city’s most popular destinations for couples. I would walk past the imperial palace every morning, up the winding road that was oddly reminiscent of the picturesque Montmartre one sees in romantic movies . The fashionable trend that year was young male baristas. Everywhere it seemed that handsome young men in their early twenties were taking orders with their iPads and pouring coffee with exaggerated precision and explanations—slow drip, siphon, Chemex. Seoul in 2009, Samcheong-dong in particular, seemed hipper than anywhere else I had recently visited, but when I told my mother about it later, back in New Jersey, she looked at me blankly. Then, after a long pause, she said, “What about the creek? I used to take our dirty laundry and wash it there.” I told her that no one did laundry in creeks anymore and that I hadn’t seen anything resembling a creek in my walks. In her mind, though, she was back there, the youngest of the family, taking the washing to the creek on afternoons when she was let out of school early.
    Again the mind does a loop, and all roads converge on a single moment on June 25, 1950. For those of her generation who lost somebody, life is forever divided between before that day and after.
    It takes the six of