Jade Lady Burning Read Online Free PDF Page B

nonjudgmental and there is one thing I’m sure of—I’m better than that son of a bitch who murdered Miss Pak Ok-suk.

3

    A t the Lucky Seven Club we shoved some stools out of the way, leaned up against the bar, and ordered a couple of beers. We were the first customers in the joint. Most of the GIs had just gotten off work and hadn’t yet had time to eat chow, shower, shave, and get on down to the ville.
    A couple of business girls scurried in and out, playing grabass, and only three or four of the waitresses were yet on duty. Ernie hit up the barmaid first.
    “Where’s Kimiko?”
    “Kimiko?”
    “Yeah. Old woman. Long hair. Big jeejes. ” He cupped two hands in front of his chest.
    “You mean Ok-suk onni.” The barmaid thought about it for a minute and then shook her head and got back to washing glassware. “I no see her for a long time.”
    Ok-suk onni meant the older sister of Ok-suk. If that’s what everyone called Kimiko, they must have been close.
    The barmaid was a nice-looking gal, sturdy and squat, like maybe her ancestors had ridden in from the central plains of Asia, but she was shapely in all the right places. Her long black hair sat atop her round head, knotted by a single polished chopstick.
    I waited until she finished her glasses and then I asked her name.
    She looked up at me, surprised, the drying towel still in her hands.
    “Mangnei,” she said, which wasn’t an answer because mangnei just means little sister. GIs wouldn’t know the difference, though.
    “What’s your name?” she asked.
    “Opa,” I said, which wasn’t an answer either because opa just means older brother.
    Her eyes widened and she started to laugh. Soon we were speaking Korean together and I bought her a Coke. GIs walked in and she got busy but after the first flush of business there was a lull and she came back to us and I asked her about the woman named Pak Ok-suk.
    I expected reticence, a closing of ranks against a foreigner. What I got was a girl who wouldn’t shut up, a girl who seemed proud that Itaewon had finally hit the Korean equivalent of the tabloids.
    Everyone had heard about the murder and the manner in which it was done and “Mangnei” was as fascinated by the grotesquerie as anyone. Other girls walked over and started to add their embellishments and before long I had more information than I really wanted.
    Pak Ok-suk had drifted into Itaewon from the countryside, cast off by a family that could no longer afford to keep her. Not that they couldn’t afford to feed her. They could manage that. What they couldn’t manage were her eccentricities—her demands for new clothes, her willfulness in going out at night with her friends, and her refusal to take her father’s word as law. The cramped quarters of the Korean rural home got tighter each day until the walls were about to explode and the family lashed out at her for being the source of their shame, for being a grown daughter yet unmarried.
    The young men her age were in the Army, manning a fighting force almost as big as America’s in a country one-sixth the size. The country was crammed with armaments and soldiers that pushed up against the Demilitarized Zone, threatening to burst across.
    Her choices included the textile mills and the factories, filled with white-bandannaed female automatons churning out hightech equipment for the world’s consumers. Or collecting tokens, sweeping out buses, jamming the passengers in the door, straddling the exit to keep anyone from falling out, shielding them with her body.
    Instead she chose Itaewon.
    At first she was just a barmaid’s helper, doing lowly work: the sweeping and the cleaning and the washing of the bar rags. She hid from the GIs but watched them with her big round eyes and, as time went by, she became more bold. She poured Cokes for them or popped open beers, saving the more complicated highballs for her wiser sisters. And she even went so far as to collect money from them and hand it over