By Kim Heung-sook
J is not a great fan of rain, but he welcomed the drizzle that morning. The moment he woke up, he wrapped himself in the biggest shirt he saw and went up to the rooftop garden. There, ``Ppong One" seemed to be thriving in her new home while ``Ppong Two" was sending a lustrous green hello from two feet away. ``Thank you, Ppong Two, for cheering your sister." J said inwardly. He felt like a helpful parent.
The word parent reminded him of a 10-year-old girl he had read about in a newspaper the previous week. A Yemeni girl who was married off to a man more than three times her age by her own impoverished parents. They later said they had done ``what was best" for her. The so-called husband beat the little girl and forced her to have sex. The brave girl went to a courthouse by herself and asked for a divorce. After much publicity and efforts on the part of a female lawyer, she finally retrieved her freedom and went back to her family.
J understood that the decision had been made by the girl and that her father, who had 15 other children, had promised that he wouldn't marry off the girl or any of her sisters. However, it would have been better if she had found a new home, J thought, feeling uneasy for being unable to do anything for her. As if to console him, the soft rain touched him soothingly, cooling his unhappy face. He felt refreshed. Perhaps ``rain" stands for ``refreshing after infinite numbness," he grinned.
To change his own mood, he turned towards Ppong One and happiness welled in his eyes instantly. ``Ppong" or ``뽕" in Korean, refers to the mulberry tree. Ppong One and Ppong Two are two trees looked after by J. Before meeting them, J had no idea what mulberries looked like. He just came across the name while reading his grandfather's autobiography. A chapter was titled ``If Only I Had a Mulberry Tree."
``My mother was quite good at the old way of weaving," the first line read. Grandpa's father was a bed-stricken intellectual suffering from a long-enduring illness. Having no farmland, the family was extremely poor. Grandpa's mother did everything to support the family, weeding others' fields and paddies during the farming seasons and weaving silk when farming was slow. It was back in the 1930s and women had few choices of work outside the home.
``As we didn't have mulberries of our own, we had to rent a neighbor's. We would feed their leaves to silkworms until they became cocoons. You have to feed them night and day and frequently change the wicker tray on which they excrete. When the worms turned into cocoons, we had to give half of them to the neighbor in payment for the leaves. Every time we gave the half away, I thought it was unfair … Since then, I have kept a secret yearning for mulberries. I vividly remember the sound of silkworms eating away the leaves. It was so much like the sound of a summer shower."
While the lines impressed J tremendously, he felt ashamed, too. He had never imagined his grandfather had such a sorrowful yearning embedded in his heart. He was a man of humor, always ready to put trust in his grandchild. After consulting a few plant traders, J obtained five young mulberry trees at the end of last winter. He gave three of them to his amused, if not pleased, grandfather and brought home the other two. He planted Ppong One in a white porcelain pot on his veranda and Ppong Two in the rooftop garden.
Ppong One grew remarkably fast, indulging in the sunlight coming through the glass window even when it was cold outside. Ppong One's height almost doubled her sister's in the open-air garden. Though short, Ppong Two seemed solid with her thick, shiny leaves. Last month, she pompously presented berries, while Ppong One was withering like a skinny old lady. The drooped plant seemed to be longing to live in the garden but J hesitated to move her as the prolific Ppong Two was suddenly suffering, or so it seemed, from the onslaught of ants.
He pondered on and made up his mind to trust the trees as his grandfather had trusted him. He moved Ppong One to the rooftop. On that morning, he realized that she was looking better than ever and that her sister was full of spirits: she was free of berries as well as ants. Heading back home for breakfast, J was thinking that when it's hard to tell what's best for a child, you'd better trust it. Then, he decided to have trust in the Yemeni girl, wishing her the best.