A Tale of Two Sisters, and My Tale of Two Best Friends
My best friend and I met when we were seven. My mom told me there was a new employee at the nail salon she worked at. Her daughter went to the same school as me.
“You two can be friends!” My mom was excited. I was not.
“You only want me to be friends with her because she’s Korean,” I complained.
“No, that’s not the only reason! Her mom is nice. I think her daughter will be too. Just try meeting her.”
I went on grumbling, but the next day at recess I asked for people to point her out. When I found her she was walking the perimeter of the asphalt schoolyard alone, around and around, skimming her too-long puffy jacket sleeve against the fence. I thought, “That’s really creepy,” but I kept that to myself and approached her with, “Our moms work together.”
She looked at me warily without saying a word, so I spoke again.
“Suzie. That’s your mom right?” My mom had told me the woman’s English name she used with her customers, and it turned out to be the magic word. Her cautious face broke out into a smile, and she let me into her life.
We almost always played at her apartment or at the park, since her dad rarely let her go to other people’s homes. He worked nights stationed at the radio for a Korean taxi company, and during the day he was shut up in his room, asleep. Our play was hushed so as not to wake him, and our most reliable past-time was watching scary movies on her laptop.
The Ring was one of our favorites, but my friend was always seeking new thrills, and she discovered them through her dad. Her dad would lock himself in his room on his days off and watch movies that were off-limits to us. But then he would tell his daughter about them. He knew she would get hooked.
When we were eleven, her dad told her about Janghwa-Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters). It was about two girls like us, connected at the hip, and she campaigned harder than she ever had before to get us access. After a few weeks of begging, he gave in, told me to get permission from my mom, and we watched it with him.
It felt like an initiation, being invited into his room with the only television in the home. He put the VHS from the Korean video rental shop on their block into the VCR and rewinded it to the beginning. He sat up on the edge of his bed, close to the TV, while my friend and I were propped against the wall cowering under blankets. Even though I didn’t understand all of the dialogue, it didn’t matter. There wasn’t a whole lot of talking and I got the gist that bad things were happening.
At the end of the movie, I teased my friend.
“You’re crying?” I poked her arm and laughed. “It’s just a movie.”
“I’m so sad…so sad for the girl,” she wept. “I feel like I understand her.”
I was shaken too, but I didn’t know how to show it. The aftermath felt different than the recovery from other movies we’d watched. Watching scary movies together was like the bizarre crazy-glue in our friendship. The terror we felt, how we would need each other to walk down the haunted halls of her apartment to go to the bathroom at night, bonded us like we were survivors of something we experienced together. But that night after the tape reached the end, and the images in our minds didn’t, instead of sleeping over, I called my mom and asked her to pick me up, and my friend slept in her mom’s bed. I wanted to feel certain that my own family was still there for me, still in one piece.
Janghwa-Hongryeon begins as two young sisters are returning to a house they don’t want to be in. The patriarch father is an oblivious man, drowning in depression and avoidance. He can only understand the world as one which he must maintain control over. His wife, the girls’ stepmother, also strives for order. She is obsessed with outward appearances of put-togethered-ness and likeability, covering up an intense lack of self-esteem that she takes out on the girls. The sisters, SooMi and SooYeon have little agency over their own lives, but have immense love and affection for one another.
For most of the movie, the audience doesn’t know what exactly happened to the family that led to the state in which we first meet them, disconnected and alienated from one another under the same roof. But the disjointedness is palpable in the creepy house. The house serves as the central symbolic metaphor of the story. It is a shuttered and lightless structure with a Japan-meets-West design aesthetic that I found to be unsettling, reminding me of Korea’s struggle of unearthing the many tragic parts of its history, more often burying tragedy at the cost of abandoning wisdom, in an attempt to never fall victim again. There are countless more objects and metaphors inside of this shadow-filled home that are used to try to contain the secret and terrible things that aren’t being dealt with–locked wardrobes, a bloody cinched sack, a covered birdcage, the cupboard under the sink with a door that creaks open, the family members separated and contained in their rooms and barely being able to sit through dinner together.
The father, who completely pushes away the mental health deterioration of his daughters’ mother, his first wife, further exacerbates a distance between his family members. I rooted for the family, imagining a story-line in which this distance could be bridgeable, in which the characters make different choices, just like all the times that I had imagined a different outcome for my community.
Before my last year of elementary school, my parents and I moved away from our friends and relatives, out to the suburbs, and I wasn’t adjusting well. My best friend’s family shared the same dream to own a house with a yard, but couldn’t afford to do it on their own, so we were amazed and ecstatic when our parents agreed to live all together in one house. Our dreams seemed to be coming true, and I felt more like myself again, like I belonged somewhere.
The house had an attic and a creepy basement, which our parents warned us not to ever go down into. It was just like the house of so many of the movies we’d seen, so naturally we snuck down in the first few days to find a strange cellar room with an ancient looking door, rotting and dusty wooden benches built into the stone walls, with old eaten away thick chains and what appeared to us to be shackles. At night when our minds drifted to the basement, we gave each other giddy company. We pushed our twin beds together in our shared bedroom, reveling in the infinite sleepovers.
But before the school year ended, everything broke down. There were explosive fights between her parents, broken down doors, her mom crying and trying to escape out of a window, and screaming that rang down the street while my friend tried to get them to stop, my parents sheepishly trying to intervene, then standing nervously in their room downstairs with the door shut, waiting it out as neighbors called the police.
“Just come down to my parents’ room,” I pleaded with her, pulling on her arm, but she refused and stood at the end of the hall from her raging father, trying to save her family, begging him to calm down, crying out for her mom to unlock her door. We could be afraid of the basement and giggle about it at the same time, but we didn’t find this amusing at all. In the dark of our room after the fighting finally ended, I listened to her cry into my arm until we fell asleep.
“If my family falls apart,” she said, “You’re the only one I can lean on.”
“You can live with me,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”
Soon after though, my family speedily moved out of that house.
The thing is, there was nowhere to run to, because it wasn’t just her family that was broken. My parents stopped, or more likely never could, say what they meant to each other. In a few years, my family disintegrated into a smog of silence. My mom left us suddenly, my dad brought in a series of stepmother figures in a futile attempt to reset the family balance, and I didn’t know where I could go anymore when I was scared.
In Janghwa-Hongryeon, the adults urge SooMi to move on after traumatic loss. But she is bewildered and upset by the way her grief does not seem to be acknowledged or shared by those who should be feeling it as well, to the point that this alienates and overwhelms her, and she unconsciously abandons the linear and ordered notions of time that the adults are attempting to force onto their actually disjointed lives. Linearity, the step-by-step progression of life, is absurd and discarded, when such a tragic thing occurs in her life and everyone else seems to want to skip right over it. They try to stamp out the emotions with pills, with the futile act of washing hands with water that will never wash away what has come to pass.
We are told that the inciting incident for the family’s story in Janghwa-Hongryeon is the mental deterioration of the sisters’ mom, but we are shown very little about her. I register this absence of detail as a space that is both blank and simultaneously very heavy. We only see very few pieces that leak out amidst all of the repression in this family. And like a tenet of many horror storytellers, by leaving an empty space where the mother’s story “should” be, my imagination runs wild trying to fill in the blanks with so many ideas of what could have led to the present moment.
Scrambling to fill in the blanks that I can’t fill on my own, is a kind of coping mechanism that I adopted. Because of all the blanks I encountered in my family and community’s self-narrative, the lack of explanation for its destructive moments, I tried to grasp for a story myself. In the meantime, what is suppressed always has to find a way to the surface, and in the movie, it is in the form of terrifying ghosts, a haunting reminder that all is not okay no matter how much they pretend it to be. It is the ghosts, the tragically dead, that know the story best, and they are a constant reminder of what needs resolution in order to truly move forward.
The only real joy or sense of freedom we witness during the difficult times portrayed in the movie, is when the sisters are outside, playing and holding hands in the sunshine. During a scene where SooMi looks lovingly at old family photos, we witness a rare moment of golden light and the relief of a heart able to soften in such a hard, cruel situation. My friend’s dad used to laugh and call us the Janghwa-Hongryeon sisters. It was an observation about how close we were, no doubt, but maybe it was also about our sensitivity to the struggles around us.
My best friend and I slowly but surely began drifting apart after we left our shared house. We still saw each other and talked on the phone, but less and less. There was less laughter, less joy. We got into separate colleges. During my freshman year, after reaching the pinnacle of what our parents had urged us toward our whole lives, I reached a low point, and it sounded like she had too. That summer, over the phone, I told her I decided to drop out of school.
“I feel like I can breathe for the first time in a long time. How about you? What’s been going on?”
Our last handful of conversations had made me feel a dull knot in my stomach, listening to her grow more and more sullen, impassively reciting passages on nihilism, and that she believed there was no such thing as purpose in life anymore. I was worried, and I argued with her.
“I feel free now too, okay?” she said numbly. “It helps me to know I don’t need to have a purpose. Now I can just live.”
“But, you said yourself, you’re depressed.”
“Being unhappy is the way it is for me. It may not be that way for you, but it is for me.”
“You can break out of this tunnel you’re going down. You can do anything you want! We can do it together.”
I knew depression well too. But I also knew somewhere in there, was the kid who wanted to sing on stage, to play-act characters in elaborate worlds, the kid who felt deeply and intensely. I was desperate for that part of her to stay alive.
When we moved into that house together, I imagined us all happy. It hadn’t worked out that way, but now I imagined some alternate story-line where we would leave all those houses and the families we couldn’t save, holding hands, and finally be free to do what we had always known how to do so well together: be content and happy.
But that wasn’t the story-line we were on. After a pause she said,
“I’m tired of feeling judged by you. I don’t want to be friends anymore.”
Just as quickly as our friendship began in the schoolyard, in an instant, it was over.
I saw her once more a few years after our friendship ended, back in our hometown, but it wasn’t the same as before. She was distant, and I was different.
At age thirty, twelve years since I last saw her, I watched Janghwa-Hongryeon from behind my pillow, through fingers that closed and opened, and as if no time had passed, I looked next to me and half-expected my friend to be wrapped in a blanket and watching too.
