Bile

by Christine Lee Zilka

When the Korean War ended in 1953, my father became restless. Korea lay in ruins, but there were no more enemy soldiers and no more bombs to flee. My father had become addicted to war. Without battles, he had no sense of urgency, no sense of drama. He had already survived, and like the rest of the country, he tried to pick up his life where he had left off. But he was not used to peace. He could make no sense of math equations as an engineering student; it all seemed trivial.

He made journeys into the countryside where he had grown up, hoping to reconnect himself. On one of his outings, he found a trapper gutting a bear. An idea came to him. He asked the hunter for the gall bladder of the bear.

My father put his tongue to the gall bladder. It tasted like the war. He smiled grimly. He could not fail. He could not turn back, because behind him were the Japanese army, the North Korean army, poverty, and abuse. He could not rest. This bile would be his medicine. He wrapped up the gall bladder and froze it. Whenever he felt he was getting too content, sleeping an hour too much, smiling a second too long, he would hunger for the taste of it, bitter, and clinging to his tongue.

As children, we learned that Daddy would have died if he had not had the bile: the bile reminded him of the misery and bitterness of suffering.

What I now realize is that the bitterness stayed inside him and traveled from his tongue, down into his belly, where it now churns.

Tradition runs strong in our family. We are Korean Americans, a strong line of warriors, descended from the Mongols. We are modern Genghis Khans, quick tempered but passionate, with chronicles of suffering living in our veins. We are nomadic, settling in a country that severed our mother country in half, with a tourniquet of barbed wire, swathed in khaki green.

Suffering is so much a part of the Korean psyche that we have given it a word, Han. It is a particular suffering, a sense of helplessness against overwhelming odds, a feeling of total abandonment. This word is part of what we call ourselves and our mother country, Hankook sahrahm, Hankook nahrah; Korean people, Korean land. This Han is silent and noble. It is our code and mantra.

On our Sunday hikes, my father brings up the rear. My brother Eugene, the Boy Scout, bounds up the hill on light bunny feet. Safe on the hiking trails of the San Gabriel Mountains, I try to enjoy the views beyond the silt of smog, but Father barks at us, that there is an army behind us. We quicken our pace. There are sharp-toothed men who want to kill us. They have shotguns, horsehair hats. They ride bareback, puff on long pipes, smoke opium, stab each other in the back.

Eugene runs up the hill out of earshot. Father, Mother, and I drip with effort, and we push ourselves to each crest out of this ancestral fear.

“Eugene! Wait for us!” I shout. I don’t see him anymore, and he doesn’t answer. The path bends mercilessly in the chaparral heat.

“Forget about him. He never wait. Stupid boy, never cares about us,” says Father.

Mother hits Father on the arm. “Leave him alone. You are bossy, maybe he’s running away from you.”

Father glares. Mother doubles her pace so that her shoes kick dust back at us over the switchback.

Up ahead, I imagine Eugene’s already arrived at the destination, a shady plateau of pine trees. He’s taking a long sip of water from the water fountain up there, and drinking in the views of Pasadena. He may even see us, a short and irritated snake making its way....

Christine Lee Zilka lives in Berkeley with her husband and two wiener dogs. This is her first time in print. E-mail: cristine@cristine.net