I appreciate Yujun’s attempt to change the subject, but I don’t think I can eat without making it clear to Wansu where I stand. “I want to be part of this family with you, Wansu, but when I met Yujun, I didn’t know he was your son. He was a boy from Seoul who opened his heart to me. I can’t change my feelings for him. Or, even if I could, I don’t want to. Where do we go from here?”
A muscle in Wansu’s jaw flexes. “Perhaps this is a conversation we can have after dinner.”
“Besides, I heard Kim Seonpyung hates animals,” I add.
Yujun muffles a cough. I know he’s laughing behind his hand.
Surprise flares in Wansu’s face. Her eyebrows arch slightly. “Well, we can disregard him.”
“All of them,” Yujun presses.
“Have you had intestines, Hara?” Wansu lays another piece of pork belly on my rice. “It’s supposed to be good for your skin. It has a lot of collagen in it.”
“We can go to one of those pojang machas and have intestines and soju this week,” proposes Yujun.
“Is that one of those blue soju tents with the temporary tables?” I allow myself to be led away from the topic of Yujun and me. It’s not a fight worth having now. At least we all know one another’s positions. It’s a question of who is going to bend first.
* * *
• • •
AFTER DINNER AND the plates and dishes are cleared, Mrs. Ji brings out three platters full of a number of small bowls. “Mrs. Ji has made everything else, but we have to make the songpyeon ourselves or the ancestors might smite us.” Yujun lays out strips of wax paper. “Here is the dough.” He points to five bowls of purple, deep green, pink, yellow, and white rice-flour dough. “Chuseok is called hangawi and it is held on the day of the harvest full moon. The rice-cake dough is made of ground rice and it’s used to make the tteok in tteokbokki and the tteok in our soups. The dough is dyed only by natural means. The purple comes from blueberries and the yellow from pumpkin powder and so on. Mung bean, honey-roasted sesame, and chestnuts in syrup are the fillings. Song is for ‘pine tree.’ After we make the half-moon cakes, Mrs. Ji will steam them on a bed of pine needles.”
“You make pretty. Pretty songpyeon, pretty children,” Mrs. Ji declares.
Yujun winks at me, his dimple popping out. “The saying goes if your songpyeon is beautiful, then you will have beautiful children.”
“Wow. I’m sweating. No pressure here.” The late Mrs. Choi must have made award-winning songpyeon in order to have conceived Yujun. “How do I do this?”
He hands me a pair of gloves. “You take a small bit of dough about the size of a golf ball and press it into a disc.” His fingers spin the small circle of dough in his palm until it’s flattened into a circle. He folds his fingers slightly together so that the dough forms a cup. A spoonful of the filling is placed in the middle, and then he closes it, pinching the edges together. Some of the filling is spilling out and there’s a tear developing in the center, but the end result is a mandu-shaped delicacy that looks like a stuffed half-moon.
In the time that Yujun has shown me how to make one, Wansu has set five perfectly shaped songpyeons on a sheet of wax paper.
“Eomma makes pretty songpyeons, doesn’t she?” Yujun winks at me.
“What are some of your Thanksgiving traditions, Hara?” Wansu invites.
“Mom—Ellen—and I would go to her parents’ until they passed. For the last few years, we’ve experimented with cooking turkey different ways. We’ve done the deep fry, where you dunk a turkey into a vat of hot oil. It didn’t work out. The outside was crispy and delicious but the turkey meat was raw and we were both afraid to eat it, so that was a disaster. Last year, we cooked one with a mayonnaise mixture and it was really good. Other than that, I guess the only tradition is Ellen spending a few weeks ahead of the holiday decorating the house with fall leaves and a variety of stuffed, ceramic, and clay turkeys and then taking all the decorations down the day after.”
“We should invite her here for Thanksgiving. She can stay with us until after Christmas. I know you Americans spend that holiday with family as well, yes?” Wansu wipes her gloved hands on a wet towel and moves on to the purple dough.
“That’s right.” It’d be nice to have Ellen here, but it might also mean that Wansu is calling in reinforcements. I cast a worried look in Yujun’s direction, but he’s bent over his songpyeon. While Wansu has made nearly a dozen and I’ve somehow managed to put out half that, he’s still on his first one.
“I’m worried about your children, Yujun,” I tease.
He sets one mangled songpyeon onto the table. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Hara. It’s still the same inside. What does it matter that it’s a little”—he pauses to pat another piece of dough onto a crack that’s appeared in his dessert—“imperfect here or there?”
He’s right. Mrs. Ji delivers the first batch of steamed songpyeon. The steaming process has brought out the colors of the natural dyes and made the small pouches of dough and sweets glossy and vibrant. They’re almost too pretty to eat; even Yujun’s malformed ones somehow came out well, although some of the cracks in his overstuffed pockets are covered with flower petals made from excess dough.
As he said, they all taste the same whether he made them or Wansu did or even I did. A sense of peace settles over me, and heat pricks behind my eyes as I savor the chewy sweet. I’m sitting here with my love and my biological mother eating a traditional Korean dessert, about to celebrate one of the most Korean of holidays. This is my home. I can come here whenever I like. Mrs. Ji knows me. I have a bedroom here. I have family here. I’m only an outsider if I make it so.
“Do you like it?” Yujun asks. Wansu waits for my response as well.
I nod because I can’t speak with my mouth full of songpyeon and my heart full of love.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“How many people are coming?” I squeak. There’s a literal army of staff here.
“Thirty-four.” Wansu directs a man wearing black pants and a vest to move a flower arrangement she doesn’t like.
“Thirty-four?” No wonder we made so many songpyeon last night.
“Two brothers, two wives, a grandmother, a great-grandmother, four sons, three daughters, twelve grandchildren, assorted other relatives.”
“That’s nearly forty people.”
She doesn’t spare me a glance at that inane comment. If Ellen were here, she’d be running around, leaving half-finished projects in her wake—a flower arrangement here, canapés half-done there, the back part of her hair still in Velcro rollers. Wansu is directing this production like a general, and not a single glossy strand of hair is out of place. Dressed in a navy hanbok with elaborate silver embroidery of birds sweeping across her bodice, she consults with florists, caterers, and hospitality staff and has even approved the wine selections.