skin crawling at the hardness of his touch. Then like those before us, he and I were quickly and efficiently wed.
It all happened so fast that I had forgotten to put my silver pin in my hair. I would do it later when I combed out my hair, exchanging the braids of my maidenhood for the smooth rolled hairstyle of a married woman.
After the ceremonies we brides walked the customary three feet behind our husbands as we all crossed over the wooden causeway to the harbor’s esplanade, the men chatting among themselves in English. They no doubt assumed that none of us knew enough of the language to understand their conversation, or they would never have spoken as they did. Mr. Kam was congratulating Beauty’s husband, Mr. Yi, on getting “the pick of the litter.” Mr. Ha remarked, “Mine’s not bad for seconds, eh?” And then my husband shrugged and said, in a disgruntled tone, “Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess,” an American expression I did not know but the meaning of which seemed self-evident.
Everything else was now self-evident, too: Mr. Yi, clearly the wealthiest of the men, obviously had had first choice from among our batch of picture brides. I would later learn, in fact, that he had bribed the marriage broker, who then allowed him to pick the prettiest girl-Beauty-for himself.
My husband, on the other hand, appeared to be the least affluent, and had to settle for what was left. Me.
Somewhere I could hear my father laughing.
All of us save for Wise Pearl-whose husband took her away in a battered old wagon-walked to a nearby Korean inn, the Hai Dong Hotel, located a few blocks north of the harbor on the appropriately named Hotel Street. Mr. Noh and I were given a pleasant room with a bed, table, lamp, and window. We ate a well-prepared dinner of kimchi, noodles in black bean sauce, and fresh vegetables. Throughout this my new husband and I barely exchanged more than half a dozen sentences. Silence during meals was the norm in Korea-the better to appreciate the food-but I suspected my husband’s coolness toward me was more than mere custom, and I thought I knew why.
I had been last choice, yes, but even at that he must have looked at my picture-at this young woman wearing lipstick and kohl, all the artifice with which the matchmaker had prepared me to be photographed-and he must have thought, Well, she’s not too bad. And then he saw me in person for the first time at the immigration station and he realized that he’d been fooledeven as he and the other men had fooled us-by a doctored photograph. I did not need nunch i to tell me that he was probably feeling humiliated and angry. Could I blame him?
I never expected love or even passion that night, but I was to be denied even a trace of tenderness. In our room my husband simply told me to undress, which I did, quite self-consciously. He told me to get into bed, and I obeyed. Then he lay atop me and entered me without so much as a kiss or a soft word. I barely remember the rest of it; certainly I felt no pleasure. Soon afterward he fell asleep. I lay there beside this stranger, trying not to awaken him as tears slipped silently down my cheeks. But even as I tried so hard not to make a sound, I became aware of a muted sobbing not my own-though it could have been mine, imbued as it was with pain and loneliness. The sobs seemed to be coming from the other side of the wall behind our bed, and I remembered now that Beauty and her husband had taken the room next to ours. Through the thin clapboard wall I could hear the sound of Beauty’s weeping, in chorus with my own unvoiced grief. And though it would be some time before I learned what the locals called this little inn, I already knew all too well the singular character of a wedding night spent at the Hotel of Sorrows.
Four
The next morning Mr. Yi-by all accounts a successful Honolulu drygoods merchant-spirited Beauty away in a new Model T Ford. She looked unmistakably like someone who had spent half the
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