The Calligrapher's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

Haejung thought Miss Gordon’s preoccupation with age peculiar. What did a child’s age matter as long as she could learn? Then she remembered that Americans didn’t count a child’s gestational year, and said worriedly, “I’m sorry for the confusion, but in Western years she’ll be eight. Might that be too young?”
    “Certainly not! It’s precisely the age we’re allowed to begin enrollment.”
    Haejung bowed to acknowledge this, but mostly to hide the renewed hope she felt must surely be emanating from her eyes.
    Miss Gordon glanced toward the doorway where the scholar Han was saying goodbye to Reverend Ahn and Harlan Gordon, the mission director and her brother. “Will you think about it?” she said.
    Haejung corrected her gently. “Thank you very much. It’s kind of you to consider my worthless daughter. I’ll mention it to her father and he’ll decide.”
    “Your daughter is very charming. Such terrific energy she brings to our little Sunday school,” said the missionary. “Good! School begins a week from Monday. Let us know in advance if possible. I do hope she’ll join us.” Miss Gordon shifted her gloves to free her right hand, and moved to shake Haejung’s hand, an embarrassing thing the missionary had done before, but she then seemed to remember her manners and bowed nicely instead.
    That evening, without fanfare, Haejung brought her husband his wine and lit his pipe. No need for fancy cooking and expensive tobacco. At that moment she definitively had an advantage. Her husband settled on his cushion with an open newspaper—a moderate paper that Governor-General Hasegawa had allowed to be reinstated—and smoke floated around his shoulders. His pointed features, sternly framed by a black goatee, squared jaw and a severe headband, nevertheless held a mild expression, and his stiff, angular posture was eased by fluid drapes of flowing clothes. He wore his hair in a topknot, a revered symbol of Korean manhood that he refused to cut, though the Japanese had technically outlawed such cultural distinctions.
    Haejung had pointedly brought a tiny dark-blue cap to embroider. Made of fine sheer silk, such caps were part of a baby boy’s One Hundredth Day ceremonial garb. She kept her voice gentle and her eyes down, for without such softening traits, Haejung’s mother had often said, a woman’s presence would be like a thorn and not a flower. She spoke slowly with long silences between every sentence. “Yuhbo , husband, Missionary Gordon approached me today. They’ve built a Christian girls’ school behind the church. Korean teachers only. Your daughter has been given the courtesy of an invitation to attend. The teacher is one of the first graduates of Ewha Women’s College. What an honor for your daughter!”
    He turned a page and continued to read his paper.
    She patiently embroidered a geometric pattern with gold thread around the cap’s edge. “She mentioned that the girls’ class is only half full. They need more students.”
    Pause, puffs of pipe, another page turned, sips of wine. “Nothing comes from nothing,” he growled, quoting a proverb.
    She waited, sewed and said, “Yuhbo, so much changes every day. Think of what we’ve seen in our short lives. They say from Pyeongyang to Busan all kinds of children attend the missionary schools, many from yangban families. The new teacher is yangban herself.” She let this fact sit for a moment and added, “Yee family, originally from Seoul,” so he would know the teacher was of noble lineage and not the offspring of a commoner claiming higher status, which was often the case after Japanese-influenced reform laws had equalized the classes.
    Han puffed the dying ember in his pipe, laid it aside and turned thelast page of the newspaper. Haejung could sense his irritation at her persistence, though politeness dictated refrain in his showing it. She pressed on. “They teach the requirements—Japanese grammar, geography and arithmetic—but