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

the truck would move.
    If only it had pulled out right then and there … 
    There it is again, the mantra “if only.” I am always made aware of the alternative universe where things turned out differently, in which lives were saved. I am used to the mantra. For immigrants, regret can become a way of life.
    Shouts are coming from somewhere. Somebody, some panicked mother or father, a desperate voice pleading with young men to give up their spaces to women and children. Before the shouts register, before my grandmother has a moment to ponder the words or protest, the seventeen-year-old rises. “I’ll go,” he says, then reassures her: “I’ll find another ride, Mother. Don’t worry.” Then, just as quickly, he is out of sight, followed by the sound of the engine. It all happens in a blink, and my grandmother, bewildered by this unexpected twist, turns frantically in the direction where her son has gone, and the truck is moving suddenly, too fast for her to think clearly, and only later does it occur to her that she should have jumped off right then and dragged him back. She should have sought out the one who had shouted and gouged out his eyes. This is war, and a split-second decision is costly. There she is, my grandmother, dumbstruck on a speeding truck, without her oldest child. The baby that lived.
    Seoul was captured three days later.
    The finality in my mother’s voice comes without emotion. “The end,” her voice seems to say, although this story has no end. The war ensues, and the family moves from town to town, staying in makeshift tents and in the homes of relatives and strangers. For three years, most of the country is on the move.
    My mother’s family stops in the city of Suwon to wait for my uncle, but he never arrives. Some days later, they run into neighbors who report seeing him dragged away by North Korean soldiers. His hands were tied behind him with a rope, they say. The road back to Seoul is blocked now, and my grandmother waits in vain.
    How long did you wait? I ask.
    How long is long enough?
    My mother is not sure. She was only four years old, after all, but the others, including my younger uncle, who lives in Seoul, are not clear on this either. What my mother recalls is the image of her mother, half-crazed and wailing, wearing her skirt over her head as though it were a scarf and roaming the neighborhood in the evenings. Every evening the older children would go out in search of her, and she would inevitably say that she had been looking for her son. This behavior never stops. Some days she wanders and searches, and other days she remains quiet and stares into space.
    Growing up, this story was repeated to me often, and each time, I wished for a different ending. A different plot. It was a story then, sad and yet morbidly exciting because my mother was a part of it. But later I came to see it was also a sort of therapy, the way my mother kept on telling it over and over, as her mother had done for years. And the storytelling continues as I type these words here in New York, in a language alien to those who lived through the division, a language that shields me from the worst of my grief. For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan , and war is easier to say than junjeng .
    Years after the war was over, the only thing my grandmother liked to do was visit shamans. The eerily accurate shaman of Inwangsan (Mount Inwang), the baby girl shaman famed for locating the bones of the neighbor’s missing child, the virgin shaman, the old maid shaman, the fat matron shaman—she went to see them all. They all said the same thing: Yes, he’s alive. He’s up north. He’s in Pyongyang. I would like to believe this is true, as she must have. Their assurances kept her going, though by the time I was born, she had suffered a stroke and spent her days in bed. She was sixty-five. I would