Read Online Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim - Free Book Online

them several hours to reach Seoul Station because the streets are packed with people fleeing. The older children take hold, protectively, of the hands of the younger ones. The walk is about two and a half miles, but my grandmother is alone with five children, carrying as much as she can on her back. My seventeen-year-old uncle must have led the group.
    No family photograph remains from that day or those immediately thereafter. Photographs are an indulgence when you are running for your life. I have looked up black-and-white pictures of Seoul from that day, faded evidence of refugees who could be from any Asian country fleeing any war. They put their heads down and made their way to the south, where the bombs from the north would not reach. No one complained. No one questioned. This was the generation that had seen it all, the heartache of having their country taken by Japan, their mortal enemy, and now the heartache of this division that seemed to have happened overnight. Those years, from 1945 to 1950, had been confusing, with Kim Il-sung, the Red Army major, in the north, and Syngman Rhee, the American protégé, in the south. Cold War politics knows no bounds, and the people had no say in its dreadful consequences. Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious.
    It was a miracle that we made it to the station before nightfall. We were lucky …  at first.
    It is this “at first” that makes my heart sink. I don’t like the part that comes next, but I let my mother continue because I know that we must.
    After fighting her way through the jam-packed station, my grandmother learns that all tickets on all southbound trains are sold out. She sees people climbing onto the roofs of departing trains in desperation. After waiting there for hours, she hears about some trucks giving rides to families with young children. So she and the children run, small fists tightly folded over the smaller ones. And, miraculously, there is a dusty truck with people in back but with room for more, and they hop on, and my grandmother, soaked in sweat, makes sure that all five children are there, including the baby girl in her arms, my mother, placed there by her eldest son. These are good children, good eggs, the ones who survived against all odds.
    She plops down, leaning against the tailgate, and takes a deep breath, her tremendous breasts heaving, these breasts that fed nine infants, although she has only five to show for it. She is forty-five years old, but she looks and feels older, and she realizes she is tired, exhausted in fact, not the optimal emotion to feel at the dawn of a war, although she is not yet sure if it really is war. All she knows is that they are on a vehicle, away from the bombs, and that somehow, without her husband, she has managed to get all of them here. She feels smug for a moment and wants to congratulate herself for this accomplishment, but instead casts a lingering glance at her oldest, the son, the one who survived. He is her lucky charm. It is with him that the tide turned. He lived, and each successive baby lived, as though with him came this beautiful gift of life; and look at him now, all grown and handsome at seventeen. She can barely contain the overwhelming love in her heart and tries to pull away her gaze although she is incapable of doing so, and it is then that a shout is heard from somewhere.
    As my mother tells it, no one could clearly remember that moment afterward. There is so much confusion and commotion. Suddenly dirty faces are peering in, and people are clutching the side of the truck in a desperate attempt to board this ark that will take them away from the coming flood of violence; the only way to flee the bombs, away from Seoul, the mountainous, sprawling capital that has housed Korean royals for centuries, the epitome of every Korean’s desires, but in this moment, all at once, everyone wants to chuck it into the nearest trash can and run. The goal is to get the hell out of Xanadu, if only