Brothers under a Same Sky

Part One

1• Part One •2 3 Dear Nam Ki, This is sure hard to write you. But I have to. I have decided I cannot live at home anymore. I cannot live at home because Mama and I don’t see eye to eye. I think you know what I mean. This been building up for long time now. I need to live on my own now. I know this is hard for you, for you to understand all this. I wish we had a father for raise us. But that is how it is. Can’t help it. But I know you can help Mama and the girls better then I can. You are the man of the house now. I will send money every month to help out. But I hope you can understand. If I stay home everything be worse off so it is better I stay away. I hope you can understand. Nam Kun Nam Kun Han, or Robert N. K. Han, as he was known at the shipyard, woke up early that morning, at 5:11, according to the digital clock on the nightstand next to his bed. He was used to waking up early in the morning. That was his routine. Back home he usually woke up around 5, and given the three-hour time difference it was 2:11 at home. But it was 5:11 a.m. here. How could he have adjusted so quickly? He had arrived only yesterday. Wasn’t he supposed to have waken up later? He lay in the bed for an hour, trying to get back to sleep, but always his eyes would open to the darkness of the morning. It was cold. He was not used to the cold, even after being stationed in Korea for a couple of years. He thought he would get used to the cold, but the cold in the winter there was just too brutal. He remembered, while in the chill of his first Siberian winter, he’d often think about home, about the family, about his younger brother Nam Ki—he had given his brother the American name “Norman” for school purposes though he always went by “Nammi”—who at that time might have been getting out of school and heading down to Kalāi‘e with his friends to swim in one of the sugar plantation irrigation flues and then lie in the warm Hawaiian sun a bit before going home to work alongside their mother in the laundry, washing out the dirt, sweat, and stink from the clothes of the plantation workers and the haole and pōpolo soldiers. Those 4 1• Gary Pak •2 times he would just bite down on his lower lip and bear the cold. He would have to fulfill his two-year commitment to the U.S. Army before he could be discharged to get back home, to get away from the madness . And then, maybe then, he would marry Ellen Cho, a plantationborn Korean like himself, and not like one of those Korean women here. No, he wouldn’t want to bring home a Korean war bride like his buddy from Whitmore Village, John Kim, was going to. He could communicate with the Koreans better than John. He was fluent, mainly because his mother made sure they spoke good Korean at home. He checked the time on the clock again. Five seventeen. He could not get back to sleep. He’d get up, maybe watch television in the living room. Shelly wouldn’t mind. Do they have one TV? She and her husband were probably deep in sleep. Yes, he could hear Kenny’s faint snores through the walls of the quiet house. Slowly he got up, searched for his jacket in the open but still-packed luggage, then put it on and felt his way down the hall to the living room. It took him a while feeling up and down the walls before discovering the light switch to find the television yes, there it is and the remote, and after turning on the television he killed the ceiling light and sat on an easy chair, tilted it back so that his legs were lifted by the extending rest and scanned the channels, settling on the movie High Noon starring Gary Cooper. About ten minutes into the movie—Marshall Kane asking for volunteers in the church to help him defend...