Hasuk
BY TAMMY HEEJAE LEE
Farangiz Yusupova, Untitled, cyanotype on paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
HASUK
Tammy Heejae Lee | Feb 2022 | Issue 13
When she first came upon the listing on the SF Korean website, Hana thought it was a scam: a fully furnished master bedroom in Japantown for $750 a month, with homemade meals available on the weekends. The pictures looked too immaculate to be real, but her mother insisted she apply anyway, claiming to have a good feeling about it. She had said the same thing about all the other ones too, during the week Hana spent in San Francisco visiting other hasuk listings in the area. Most of them were too dirty or crowded with other tenants for her to feel comfortable sharing a space with. She bought a potted orchid and a box of persimmons—her mother’s suggestion, to stand out from other applicants—and showed up to the address the Japantown lister had sent her. She had never felt a desperation like this before, and with the semester starting in a few weeks, she was running out of options.
A middle-aged couple answered the door and immediately exclaimed over how generous Hana’s gifts were in a way that felt too animated and saccharine to feel true. She followed them upstairs to the room. It looked exactly as advertised, even more spacious than she had imagined. All of the furniture was white: the bed frame, desk, bookcase, her own makeup vanity. Hana felt a pang of desire—it was exactly what she and her mother had been hoping for.
Hana turned to the couple and tried to articulate how her living habits would make her the ideal homestay tenant. She mentioned that she was incredibly tidy and would be spending most of her time on campus. That during the summer and winter breaks, she would be gone to spend time with her family in Seoul. She was lying, of course, but she would make it all happen if it meant she could live here. The couple—Aunt and Uncle, they asked her to call them—beamed at her in approval, and Hana felt her heart soar. One week later, she appeared on their doorstep with two large suitcases in tow, ready to move in.
On her first night in their apartment, Aunt and Uncle asked that she join them for dinner. Hana came downstairs to the smell of doenjang jjigae and bulgogi. Her mouth watered at the sight of homemade Korean food.
“We have a few rules we’d like to go over with you, if that’s okay,” Aunt said.
Hana nodded. The rice in her bowl was too glutinous for her taste, and the doenjang jjigae was rather bland. It was free food nevertheless, so who was she to complain?
Together, Aunt and Uncle told her the following things:
She was to enter and exit through the back gate of the apartment complex, never to walk past the office or use the main gate where she’d be in plain view.
Rent was due at the first of every month, cash only, in an envelope marked with her name on the kitchen table.
Absolutely no dishes left in the sink or cooking anything that required the overhead fan.
Every time she stayed out past ten p.m., Hana would have to call Uncle and let him know around what time she planned on coming home.
The last rule made her pause, her spoon suspended in front of her mouth. Hana had a feeling that hasuk wasn’t entirely legal in this apartment complex if they were trying to keep her away from the main office, but calling every time she was out late? In Seoul, Hana didn’t come home until one or two a.m., and even then her mother never said anything. Aunt and Uncle were looking at her expectantly, so she swallowed and nodded again.
“Great,” Aunt said. “Treat us like we’re your family.”
“Yes,” Uncle agreed. “Just like family.”
Hana averted her eyes from the two, unsure of how to respond. A framed photo of a man in a suit rested on the opposite end of their table. He was smiling brightly at them—a family member of theirs, perhaps, or a politician. Hana stared at the stranger’s portrait until Aunt asked her another question, about what her parents did for a living.
When Hana went up to her room afterwards, she had to rub her hands over her stomach in a circular motion to help with what she recognized to be indigestion.
***
“Are they treating you well?” her mother asked over the phone.
Hana was folding her clothes on her bed. It had been two weeks since she had moved in, and she wasn’t sure what to say. She thought about telling her mother about how every time she opened the front door to come inside, Uncle would cry out from the second floor as if she were an intruder.
“Who’s there?!”
“It’s me, Uncle,” Hana would shout back. Uncle never said anything else, but he did cough in acknowledgment.
It was slightly suffocating to live under their scrutiny. There were things she didn’t think about before that she had to consider now, like whether she could listen to music without headphones or if her footsteps creaked when she moved around at night. Once, she had found Aunt crouched over the stairs and studying the carpet, her cupped hand displaying several strands of Hana’s hair. Hana had apologized profusely, but she was upset as well. Did she really have to worry about every strand of hair that fell from her head?
“Yes, of course.”
At the end of the day, Hana knew they meant well. Aunt and Uncle always asked about whether she ate or not, left her packages in a neat pile at the foot of her door, and knocked politely to offer a plate of sliced fruit. Sometimes when she was hungry at night, she’d creep down to the kitchen and was met with Uncle sitting at the kitchen table lost in thought, with a glass of water and a pill case in front of him. At the sight of Hana, he’d motion her over to the refrigerator to hand her an ice cream packet and then pressed a finger to his lips. A secret shared between the two of them.
“And the food?”
“Really good.”
Truthfully, Hana was becoming sick of doenjang jjigae and bulgogi at this point. She had been grateful for the free meals at first, but the soup was too watery, the meat unseasoned and dry. There was no variety to their meals, and she found it slightly strange that Aunt and Uncle ate like this every day. She missed her mother’s food, or any Korean food that wasn’t this. But she wouldn’t say any of this now.
“Find anything uncomfortable?”
Hana closed her eyes. “No.”
***
One Sunday afternoon when Aunt and Uncle were out, Hana took a closer look at the portrait on the dining table. He was a well-groomed Korean man whose suit was paired with a bright red tie, with hair that waved too perfectly to the left. Despite his neat appearance, she had a feeling he was someone who was trying to hide his age, someone who was older than Uncle even.
Hana had initially thought he was a relative of theirs who had passed away, but this didn’t look like a typical funeral portrait. The background, for one, was a landscape with neon grass and a blue sky. To the left of this man were two suns, but they looked like the cheap twinkle effect in Photoshop. Strange. Hana backed away from the kitchen and went up the stairs to go to her room, unnerved by the inexplicable feeling that the man in the picture frame was watching her.
“Who is this man?” she asked over dinner that night.
“Huh Kyung-Young.” Aunt looked disappointed at Hana’s lack of recognition. “He’s the smartest man in the world!”
“He can cure anything,” Uncle said.
She thought it would be rude to ask why he was important enough to be on their table, so instead she asked: “Is he a doctor?”
“No, the man is god!”
Hana blinked. “Oh.”
Uncle stirred his soup absentmindedly while Aunt gushed about Huh and his accomplishments: he had psychic powers that healed people just by looking at them! He drove a car without using his hands! He ran for president in Korea multiple times, he was that smart! Aunt boasted that they listened to his YouTube lectures every night without fail. That they were going to drive to Los Angeles next weekend to finally see him in person.
Hana regretted bringing it up, but now Aunt and Uncle were staring at Huh’s portrait in a wistful manner, a reverence even. They were being completely serious. She stood to excuse herself, claiming to have a lot of homework that night.
“Ask Huh for help,” Aunt told her on her way up the stairs. “If you chant ‘Huh Kyung-Young’ three times, you can channel his power to get through anything!”
***
Now Hana scheduled her days so that she would be gone before Aunt and Uncle woke up, and home when they went to sleep, curfew call be damned. She spent a lot of time at the school library or her friends’ apartments, once again hating how incredibly uncomfortable she felt. She was stuck with them for seven more months. She hadn’t told anyone about her suspicions that her landlords were in what seemed like a strange cult, but she wasn’t sure if they would believe her anyway.
In her research of Huh, she learned that the man really did claim to be a god—a surreal being, rather—who insisted that anyone who believed in him would be cured of illness. Huh and his campaign charged money for his events and “therapy” services of touching people who were sick, which confirmed Hana’s suspicions that he was someone who preyed on gullible, middle-aged Korean adults who needed something, or someone, to believe in.
In the week leading up to their LA trip, Aunt was aflutter with preparations. Even when Hana came home past midnight, Aunt was elbows deep in cooking delicacies, ironing clothes, packing and repacking their suitcases. Uncle, in the meantime, spent most of his time sleeping or lying down, claiming to need all of his strength for the upcoming weekend. Hana vaguely wondered if the envelope of cash she had given them for that month’s rent would go straight into Huh’s hands as their offering to him. What was the man doing in the States, anyway? Did he really have that many followers here?
On the night before their trip, Hana lay in her bed, relieved at the prospect of having the entire house to herself for several days. All she wanted to do was rest—she was tired of spending so much time on campus. She wanted to sleep in, blast her music as loud as she wanted to, watch Netflix until three in the morning. This was her chance; she wasn’t sure when she’d get the sweetness of solitude with them ever again.
***
It was around two a.m. when she heard a small tap at her door. Hana thought she was imagining the noise at first, so she waited until she heard it again: a soft knock, careful not to be heard throughout the whole house. She got up from bed and unlocked her bedroom door. On the other side was Uncle, who had both of his arms crossed over his midsection in an extremely self-conscious way.
“Hana-ya…” he whispered. He hesitated, debating on whether to continue. “Could you…drive me to the hospital?”
She was surprised, but nodded, and he motioned for her to be quiet as the two of them tiptoed down the steps together, trying not to make them creak. Hana could hear Aunt snoring loudly behind their closed door, so they were safe, for the time being. Uncle handed her a jacket of hers from the downstairs closet, and then the two of them were outside.
Uncle’s Camry was parked right in front of the apartment complex office, the very building she had been instructed to avoid. She got in the driver’s side and adjusted the mirrors to her eye level. Uncle leaned forward, clearly in discomfort.
“Is everything okay, Uncle?” she asked. He had set the GPS destination to the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital, which was about a ten-minute drive.
“Everything’s fine,” he replied. “Just something sharp in my stomach. I want to know what it is so I can tell Huh Kyung-Young the exact name of it.”
Hana could see the worry through Uncle’s furrowed brows, and suddenly, everything made sense: Uncle’s pills taken late at night when Aunt wouldn’t see, his frequent coughing that Hana had gotten used to, the amount of sleep he needed. Something was terribly wrong, but Uncle had been acting like he was fine so he wouldn’t worry Aunt in the meantime. Hana understood his need to hide things—hadn’t she done the same with her mother?
They drove past the pagoda in the Peace Plaza, which was awash in a soft green glow for the night. The string lights wrapped around the surrounding tree trunks glimmered sleepily in the distance. Next to her, Uncle was slumped over, leaning his head against the passenger seat window. It occurred to her that he was more worried about Aunt’s reaction, of telling her that he chose modern medicine over the surreal being they were supposed to devote their lives to. But while Aunt worshiped Huh out of fervor, Uncle’s belief might have come out of necessity. A desperation. Huh was said to have healing powers, after all. And if that was what Uncle needed, how could Hana think he was foolish or ignorant for choosing to believe in whatever it took to get him there?
“Everything’s going to be fine, Uncle,” Hana said to him. She wasn’t sure what motivated her to say that. What if they went to the hospital and found out it was something terrifying? What if Uncle really was dying, and the only person there to witness the diagnosis was his hasuk tenant?
“You’re okay, Uncle,” she repeated as she gripped the steering wheel. They were turning into the hospital parking garage. “Everything is going to be alright.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Hana saw that Uncle had nodded in agreement. What else could he do? She unbuckled her seatbelt and went over to help him out of his door. Uncle’s hand rested on the crook of her elbow, squeezing her rather tightly, as they followed the signs to the emergency room lobby together.
Hana knew it wouldn’t be long before the hospital staff would ask if she was accompanying Uncle as his family member or guardian. Standing there at the check-in counter with Uncle’s hand still holding onto her arm, Hana wasn’t sure how she would correct them, if she even would. The lies were effortless to her now, so much easier than having to explain a truth too difficult and tiresome for someone else to understand.
Tammy Heejae Lee is a Korean American writer from Davis, CA. She has a BA from UC Davis and an MFA in fiction from the University of San Francisco, where she received a post-graduate teaching fellowship. A Tin House Summer Workshop, VONA/Voices and Sewanee alum, her writing has appeared in Sundog, The Offing, and PANK, among others. She is currently a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow in fiction at San Jose State University, where she is working on her first novel about expat and hagwon culture in Seoul.
Farangiz Yusupova is an artist whose work explores ideas of cultural dissonance, home, and memory through painting. Born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Farangiz immigrated to New York with her family in 2014. She holds a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. In the summer of 2018, Farangiz was awarded a scholarship to attend a workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado. Her work was exhibited in numerous group shows such as at 56 Bogart St, Brooklyn, NY (in affiliation with M. David & Co), Dodomu Gallery and Mi-Sul Virtual Exhibition, and Yonkers Arts Weekend. Farangiz is currently participating in NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program.