Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung

Author:Catherine Chung [Chung, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 1594488088
Google: voJzHXxwvfUC
Amazon: B005GSYYUI
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2012-03-01T08:00:00+00:00

He had met my mother shortly after his service. My mother had been an organizer at her school for the student democratization movement, and my father was on the fringes of the group. He went to the demonstrations, and shook his fist and yelled, along with everyone else. He actually had no memory of the first time they met. They’d been at a demonstration, and he was standing close to my mother near the front line when a stray rock thrown by another student hit him in the back of the head. She saw the rock ricochet off his head, watched his legs give way and collapse beneath him.

She lunged forward, grabbing my father’s arm as he toppled. She scooted under it to prop him up. This was the first time she had touched a man who was not related to her by blood. He was incoherent and mumbling, and he let her drag him away from the crowd. When she’d gotten them away from the main area of conflict, an old woman watching from the front of a teahouse with a broom in her hand waved them over as they approached. She ushered them in.

My mother maneuvered the weight of my father’s body into a chair in the back of the room; once she had him propped up against a wall, she took the chair next to him. The woman brought two washcloths and told my mother to wipe off her face. She had caked toothpaste around her eyes and mouth before the rally to combat the tear gas that she knew would be sprayed over them. My mother did as she was told.

Then, carefully, avoiding eye contact with the old woman, she wiped off my father’s face. Her hands were shaking. Her knees. She kept seeing the snap of my father’s neck when the rock had hit his head, the buckle of his knees, so quick and awkward. When it happened, something inside herself she could not name had mirrored my father’s fall, dropping like a rope within her.

When she was finished cleaning his face, she touched her hand to the back of his head and found the bump there. Her hand came away sticky with blood, and she wiped it off with the cloth. She stood and thanked the woman for helping them. She gave her a little money, and asked her to give my father some tea and something to eat when he woke. Then she left him there, propped up against the wall, unconscious.

Outside, the demonstration was already over. Some students were being dragged away in handcuffs, some were on the ground covering their heads as the soldiers kicked them. The rest were running in all directions. My mother walked calmly through the chaos, her hands in her pockets, her mind humming.

In the next few weeks, she found out more about my father. He was an orphan, with only one older sister to whom he was devoted. He was very serious and very poor. He was friends with other poor young men who were equally intense.

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