Blood Sisters

Kim Yideum, Ji yoon Lee

• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781941920787
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Blood Sisters tells the story of Jeong Yeoul, a young Korean college student in the 1980's, when the memory of President Chun Doohwan's violent suppression of student demonstrations against martial law was still fresh. Yideum captures with raw honesty the sense of dread felt by many Korean women during this time as Jeong struggles in a swirl of misguided desires and hopelessness against a society distorted by competing ideologies, sexual violence, and cultural conservatism. Facing this helplessness, her impulse is to escape into the world of art. Blood Sisters is a vivid, powerful portrayal of a woman's efforts to live an authentic life in the face of injustice.

Part I

Blue Stockings

I open my eyes. I close them. Shit. Goddamned sunshine. I squint and gaze at the blurry moving object before my eyes. Wavering pale ankles. Long legs that keep extending. And blooming buttocks … Fuck! Let me see the whole you. My head is splitting apart. The woman is facing the window askew; her brassiere is wrapped around her waistline, full with two lovely rolls. She closes the hooks, turns the bra around, and pulls it up to her breasts—her round, full, warm breasts. Her face is hidden by her bushy hair. Turn toward me. Hold me! Kiss me!

Throughout my life I’ve seen countless naked women’s bodies. Beautiful ones. Well, to be specific, I’ve seen hundreds of paintings of women’s nudes. From Botticelli to Courbet to Dali, all their female nudes. I’ve seen them all. Realism, Surrealism, the year of completion, blah blah blah, I don’t really care. I just liked the ones reprinted in high resolution. One day in the corner of the silent library, I put my tongue on the print of L’Origine du Monde. When I did that, it felt like my body turned into wet foam, curling into itself, sucked into that hole—leaving this filthy, noisy world, its pop quizzes and minimum wage.

This live nude painting—here and now—is sensual in her toasty peach-fuzz. “I would never have taken up painting if God didn’t give women breasts in such marvelous ways.” I recall Renoir said something like that, then painted his life away. I probably indulge in women’s nudes as much as he did. It doesn’t really matter whether I see the marvel of the cosmos or merely a voyeur’s object.

The plaster casts for fine arts students that stood along my high school’s corridor were always mottled in graffiti and dirt. As a member of the Fine Arts Club, I was in charge of cleaning them. It was an endless cycle: if I erased the beard off one face the night before, the very next morning a crotch would be covered in pubic hair, a chest covered with twenty nipples. “Lowbrows, they just don’t get art,” muttered the art teacher. He tenderly held the Venus he had sculpted himself, and sleazily slow danced his way into the art room. He shrouded her in a white veil, placed her in the corner of the drawing room, and then told me to lock the door behind me and to make sure to check the lock before I left.

The next day I just had to scream. Oh, Jesus, which one of you perverted motherfuckers crawled in here? Who knocked over our Venus and sprayed fucking semen everywhere? I tenderly wiped Venus’s lips and throat with a rag for a while, but then threw the rag aside and stormed out. I thought about asking my friend to get my brushes and palette from the art room, but I didn’t care anymore. That was it—I was done with the Fine Arts Club where I mostly killed time anyway.

“Keep pushing on as though you just started” was the motto given to the club, but mine was the polar opposite. I never finished anything. It was easier to erase it and start over. Easier than swatting a fly.

There she is between my half-closed lids. “Are you awake?” Jimin Sunbe¹ is asking. “I’m gonna be late again.” Brassiere fastened, her form clothed. “See you later!”

“Wait a sec!” I start coughing. I want to say I’m sorry, I want to say I went over the line last night, but the door slams shut. What’s the occasion? She’s putting on a skirt? And even lipstick? Ever since I started crashing at her place, Jimin Sunbe’s outfit was consistent. She always had her hair tied in a tight ponytail, wore a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and threw on a black jacket and gray scarf. When she added her giant backpack, she looked like a traveler about to go on a trip.

Last night, Jimin, without warning, led a woman with an outfit similar to hers and two men into the room. I was just splitting the hard ramen noodles in half to throw them into a pot of boiling water. I didn’t know we were having guests. Awkward. I crushed the ramen with my fist.

“Say hello, everyone! Here are my dear friends, and this is … well, I’ve talked to you guys about her. This is a talent who hopefully will join our Blue Stockings Club.” Jimin tapped my shoulder as she smiled—her pink chewing gum emerged between her lips. This was the first time I’d even heard of the Blue Stockings Club or anything about me joining it, so I was mostly confused. I turned the stove off and bowed my head to the guests. My big toenails were blue (and they weren’t the only things on my body that were bruised). The woman with a mole on her nose added more water and two more ramen packets into the pot. When she noticed the crushed smithereens of my ramen noodles, she abruptly blurted out, “So, are you and Jimin dating? Just kidding!” and cracked an egg into the pot. My ears felt hot.

We set up the foldable table to eat ramen together, but one guy said he’d already eaten and instead of joining us opened a book on the floor, and started rambling away. Words like “gender,” “sexual minority,” “social class,” “proletariat,” and “anarchists” were being thrown around. I couldn’t swallow any of it—not the ramen, nor the kimchi, but especially not these words that felt heavy like lead candies. Fucking hell. I hate these pretentious intellectual types. It’s gonna be rough if they talk like this all day.

“So, like, I have a … previous commitment. Goodbye.”

“What? Where are you going in the middle of the night? You have nowhere to go,” Jimin asked, perplexed.

I picked up my jacket anyway and fled the room. Picking at the crumpled heel of my shoe with my finger, I tried to think of a place I could go. I had nowhere, it was true. I felt lost.

I was squatting by the corner of the narrow alley for about thirty minutes when I saw a black cat with a perky tail walking along the brick fence. I meowed at him, but this Monsieur White Whiskers ignored me and kept going. I threw a pebble at him. After a while teenagers, probably middle schoolers, entered the alley. They were staggering and looked drunk. They were about to light their cigarettes, leaning against the fence, when their eyes met the pair of eyes belonging to a squirming heap in the darkness—me. They slowly backed away, tripping over trash cans, and ran out of the alley. Assholes, I wasn’t gonna bite. I swear I am not hostile-looking, nor am I the kind of trash who mugs children. I’m just a defeated youth, a scream, a lamentation thrust into the sky. I enjoy my excellent loser attitude. The squirming heap in the darkness whispered into my ear: You coward. What are you afraid of? Go on. Destroy yourself. You have the right to self-destruct. Good thing I wasn’t naive enough to be persuaded by nonsense like “a right to dream” or “a right to self-destruct.”

Arf arf arf. A dog emerged. Was today the Thursday when all the dogs and cats on this earth hang out together? I doubt it was God dropping him on my lap. Probably a UFO threw this dog out along the way. Holding the ugly dog, I walked out of the alley, into the street. The street felt warmer. The main street was brimming with people.

I kept walking mindlessly. I found myself walking along the exact trajectory of the bus line heading toward my parents’ home. I don’t know about my father and stepmother … no, those fuckers, but I should’ve kissed my cat goodbye when I ran away from home. I didn’t know things were going to get this bad when I first left. My cat probably threw a tantrum to get them to bring me back, probably went on a fasting protest. But by now she would be purring, comfy in my dad’s crotch. My cat, Leche. When I would call Leche! she would run toward me. She would lap up milk—funny, Leche lapping up leche—the way she licked her jet-black paws. My calculating, lazy, petulant creature. I missed her.

I stopped in front of the pet shop. A shopgirl about my age opened the glass door to pull down the metal shutter. Her thighs were bulging out of her short leather skirt. She scowled at her nails. Her manicure must have been ruined. I approached the shopgirl, and showed her the stray dog I’d been carrying.

“Do you guys buy dogs by any chance? How much can you give me for this?”

“Wait, this isn’t your dog! That’s Nana. Her mama was looking everywhere for her!”

She told me Nana’s mama was at some café right now. She painstakingly described the café, which turned out to be super easy to find. It would have been simpler if she just said the café was on the second floor of the building across from the Farmer’s Coalition market, on the street that connects the university to the subway station. The interior of the café was dark and stuffy. The first snow is falling, the song that won some collegiate composer’s award, was playing. It didn’t suit the stale space. Don’t be sad, the white snow, the first one of this season, is falling. I liked the song’s opening; I’d spent my senior year of high school singing this song. It didn’t snow then, however.

The café’s owner yelped when she saw the dog in my arms, and started screeching, tears pouring out of her eyes. “Oh my god, where have you been, Nana? What happened? Did you get hurt, my love? Oh, my baby, you must be starving!” She showered the dog with tender words I’ve never heard directed toward myself in my entire life. For a long time, the café owner was hysterical, but she finally got it together enough to bring up the words I was waiting for. “How can I thank you? How can I reward you for bringing my Nana home?”

“Well, I wasn’t really looking for a reward …” I coyly trailed off like I was some sort of kind animal rescue volunteer. I couldn’t tell her what I was really thinking, not to her face, comically mottled with mascara. I hoped she’d just give me some cash and let me go, but she kept on asking what my name was, where I lived, what I was majoring in, all while her eyes were rapidly examining me up and down.

“Okay, okay. What do you think about working here? It doesn’t matter if you have no experience as a server.” She trailed off, watching for my reaction. “This is such a fortuitous situation, I will pay you a better rate.”

1. Sunbe is a term used by underclassmen to address older students. In Korea, it’s expected to address others in terms of their social relationship to you, with names for upperclassmen, boss, older brother, younger sister, etc.

Instant Days

I drank too much with the café owner that night. When I got back to Jimin’s place there was no one there. The room was a mess. It looked like the secret police had raided the place. The chairs were toppled over among beer bottles, and books, notes, and pamphlets were strewn about everywhere. I zigzagged left and right to clean up the place. A little later, Jimin was back and explained that there had been an argument among her friends, but they eventually stopped fighting out of consideration for her. She’d just seen them off. I drank from one of the open bottles and curtly asked why they had to do the group study here. I shouldn’t have said it, I was just a freeloader who wasn’t paying rent or buying groceries—not even a single ramen packet—just hanging out for over two weeks now, a full moon cycle. I added further insult by telling her about my new job.

“You don’t need to work at a shady place like that,” she scolded. “I never asked you to pay rent. What was the point of running away from home if you were just going to walk right back into another shithole. It would be better to starve.”

“You don’t know anything about me!”

“You’re being irresponsible! Think about it. What year are you living in? You just stroll through campus, molotovs and tear gas in the air, and you don’t feel anything?”

“Yup! I’m a clueless airhead. So what? Am I supposed to be like you, memorizing manifestoes and communist curricula, breaking bricks to throw at cops during a strike?”

“Think about the summer we met!”

“Fucking hell, I’m so tired of that story. We just protested because everybody was doing it! Everybody was protesting General Park’s constitutional amendment, yelling catchy slogans, because how could we not? If you didn’t join the protest, everybody would’ve thought you were an unpatriotic government dog! It’s different now. I just protested because I wanted you to like me. I have no political ideology of my own. Don’t tell me to read this book, that book, join your ‘group study’ like it’s some sort of holy ritual.”

“You’ve changed since your stepbrother died.”

That’s when all of the evening’s drinks rushed back into my mouth. I ran to the shared bathroom down the hall with my hand over my mouth, but someone had locked the door. I puked all over the bathroom door. Someone emerged to curse me out. By the time I cleaned myself up, he was gone. I had no one to curse at, so I just lifted my middle finger to the sky. Fuck you, motherfucker. Godfucker.

I came back to the room to lie down, still huffing with anger. Jimin held my hand under the covers. Her fingers were raw from her blood-drawing nail-biting habit. We knew we had drawn blood from each other’s hearts with our drunken argument, so we waited to fall asleep holding hands. She usually wrote before going to bed under the nightlight, but not tonight. Around dawn, we kissed. I held back my morning breath as our lips touched. I fell back to sleep.

Now I am putting away the futon and folding the pajamas she left behind. The room feels empty. I feel abandoned. I press the play button of the dusty cassette tape player. “A Bird on a Metal Tower” by Kim Dusu rings out of it. It’s the tape I gave Jimin for her birthday. So she had listened. I thought she only paid attention to Kim Min-ki and Nochatsa.

I open the photocopy of Kim Nam-jo’s poetry collection Jimin had given me. The very first page has an inscription: “Let’s go forward together,” in red, signed, “From, Warrior Jimin.” Warrior, huh? She isn’t as strong as she pretends to be. I usually don’t like the poems Jimin likes. Same with the prose.

Mayakovsky isn’t too bad. I like “A Few Words About Myself,” “Cloud in Trousers.” I heard he was a revolutionary, but his poems are avant-garde. I don’t know p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV