Either she didn’t know the answer or she wouldn’t tell me. But I’d learned that it was useless to ask her most questions. I could have asked my mother, Omoni, when we were doing housework together. So listening was easy for me I’d done it all my life.īut lots of times I didn’t learn what I wanted to know by listening. And girls weren’t supposed to talk much anyway, not when men or boys were around.

The youngest in the family was never supposed to talk when older people were talking. I was supposed to be quiet most of the time. And you had to know when to be quiet and who to ask. You had to do two opposite things: be quiet and ask questions. It always made me want to clench my fists and stamp my foot and hit something. When I asked Tae-yul later, he said it was none of my business. What rumor? What was going to happen? What kind of trouble? Hastily, I shoved the bowl through the window and left the room, sliding the paper door closed behind me. He’d noticed me kneeling by the table with the last of the bowls in my hands I was listening so hard that I’d stopped moving. I am afraid there will be terrible trouble-”Ībuji cleared his throat to cut off Uncle’s words. “They’re masters of organization-if they want this done, you can be sure they will find a way to do it. “I don’t know, Hyungnim,” he said, disagreeing respectfully.

The longer I stayed in the room, the more I’d hear. I put the bowls on the shelf one at a time, arranging them in a very straight line. From the window I could reach a shelf in the kitchen. The kitchen was built three steps down from the central courtyard, and the sitting room three steps up. Finally, I moved around the table and began putting the bowls through the little low window between the sitting room and the kitchen. Then I stacked the brass bowls-quietly, so they wouldn’t clang against one another. First I scraped the scraps of food and dregs of soup into an empty serving dish. I wasn’t supposed to listen to men’s business, but I couldn’t help it. He was talking to Uncle and my brother, Tae-yul, as they sat around the low table after dinner, drinking tea. My father wasn’t talking to me, of course.

“It’s only a rumor,” Abuji said as I cleared the table.

When my name was keoko