Page 112 of Heart and Seoul (Seoul 1)

Wansu—I can’t quite bring myself to call her Eomoni yet—says something sharply in Korean. When I pop open my eyes, I see the makeup artist bowing and stepping backward. Wansu picks up the tube and shakes it again.

“Your eyes are uneven and that’s why the eyeliner is hard to apply. They turn down at the ends and you need to—” Wansu flicks the applicator across my lid. “Close,” she orders. I obey. Two more swipes and Wansu is done.

I check the mirror. The black lines are perfectly done, highlighting the shape of my eyes, evening them out and making them look larger. Our eyes are the same. I don’t have my father’s eyes. They are Wansu’s. I touch the corner of my eye and feel a spot of wetness.

Wansu is busy capping the tube, so she doesn’t see the tears slip down my cheek. I didn’t even realize that tears were threatening to fall. If I’d had warning, maybe I could’ve stopped them. But they climbed my throat and spilled out my eyes before I could even blink. The makeup artist makes a sound in the back of her throat and comes over with a puff to dab away the evidence of my emotional fallout. But the discovery that the only way I was ever going to learn to put on eye makeup correctly was to find my birth mother who had the same eye shape as mine is too much for me, and like the night at the river, I can’t quell the torrent.

“Are you crying, Hara?” Sounding horrified, Ellen comes over and crouches down next to the chair.

“No,” I weep into my hands.

“You never cry.” She looks over at Wansu. “She didn’t even cry at her father’s funeral.”

“Tears will smudge her makeup,” Wansu replies, as if I merely got a speck of dust stuck under an eyelid. The answer is so matter-of-fact, so cold, so typical of Wansu, that it wrenches a laugh from me. I laugh and laugh and cry until the two are so mixed up that I don’t know what’s coming out of my mouth and no one knows how to deal with me. They all just wait until I can get hold of myself.

“We don’t have to do this today. We can wait until you’re comfortable. Isn’t that right, Wansu?” Ellen turns to the other woman for confirmation, but Wansu’s face is granite hard. She does not want a delay and neither do I. Waiting only makes things harder. Under Wansu’s unflinching gaze, I pull myself together, sucking in deep breaths until the flood of tears is quelled and the hysteria-induced laughter is tamped down. There’s something so reassuring about Wansu’s steadiness. It’s easy to understand how Yujun overcame his stuttering. Wansu simply wouldn’t allow it to exist, and as the force of her personality has carried her through all the past hardships, it will carry all of us through this one.

The makeup artist fixes my makeup, and at the end, I pat my perfectly lined eyes dry and rise. “I’m ready.”

* * *

• • •

THE PHONE IN my hand vibrates gently. I know it’s Yujun but I refuse to look at it. What if he asks me not to speak? What if he tells me he has a different solution? I’ll cave, so I take the coward’s way out and refuse to even tempt myself.

When we arrive at the IF Group building, there is a wall of photographers standing in the underground parking garage.

Ellen squeaks out her surprise. “Isn’t this private property?”

“It is,” Wansu replies grimly. She snaps a command out to the driver in Korean and then turns to Ellen and me. “Park Minho will clear a path, but we can’t wait until everyone leaves or we will be late. When I open the door, follow me. Do not answer any questions.”

“We can’t speak Korean anyway.” Ellen smooths her hair back.

“There will be questions in English,” Wansu warns.

“We’ll be fine, won’t we, Hara?” Ellen replies.

I make some noise, which Ellen takes as agreement, but in truth I don’t feel fine at all. I bend over slightly and start breathing through my mouth. There’s a hurricane stirring up in my stomach and I’m afraid that I’ll lose the strawberry cake that I managed to choke down earlier this morning before my personal snow globe got upended and shaken to pieces.

In my head, I recite the small speech that I’m to give in front of the board of directors. In high school, I was only able to give half of my prepared paper in speech and debate before I got so tongue-tied that I could not squeeze another word out of my mouth. My teacher, a large, balding man by the name of Johannessen, took pity on me and sent me back to my seat. I remember his name because it took me half of the term to remember how many n’s and s’s there were. Yes, Hangul was a lot easier language to learn.

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