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The Conversation of Birds
I promised to go and there was no getting out of it now. I tried rubbing my face awake but it still felt numb around the edges. Six-fifteen in the morning. My room was blue with dawn.
"Sally-ah!! Are you coming?" Mom's voice raked like nails across my neck.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah."
My father said nothing when I came downstairs in jeans and a wind-breaker. He adjusted and re-adjusted his tie. Mom pursed her lips but she didn't say anything either. She was wearing a beige skirt and her blue lace collar blouse. Silk.
"What?" I said. "Are we going to church or something?"
In the car, Mom broke out the thermos of coffee. She poured only a bit out at a time, cooled it with her breath and passed the mug to Dad who gulped it down at each red light then passed the mug back. Cocooned in a sleeping bag, I tried to doze in the back seat. I didn't say much but Mom and Dad spoke quietly, mostly in Korean but sometimes in English, trying consciously not to exclude me.
"About forty people were coming, but not many young people. Reverend Lee said he was coming, didn't he? There should be more young people. It was horrible all those students in Kwang Joo stood up and here hardly any young people cared if they were dead or in jail." My mother sighed and passed more coffee to my Dad.
"Is your speeches ready?" she asked. My father nodded.
"I think so."
So I was the token young person. I didn't mind really. It was important to Dad and he was going to make a speech. Not that I would be able to understand it, but he was my father. There was something knotted in his face as he was writing out his speech. I asked him what was going on. He said there were student protests in Kwang Joo against martial rule. It was his home town and he had to do something. All these students were being killed for something as simple as a fair vote. Evil never makes sense but I thought of Kent State because I'd seen something about it...