Reverie
By Joanna Hong
Before she interprets any speech or interview, Claire goes for a run to ease her nerves, always listening to the same song on repeat. But today particularly concerns her. She tightens the straps of her backpack and readjusts her earphones as she tries to maintain a steady jog out of her flat in Finsbury Park. The orchestra swirls her onto the gravel path as the starlings above her dart through London’s scaffolding set against a gray sky. At the crescendo, Claire sprints, before she replays the song again, and again, the cold air stinging her lungs.
Her feet are a little heavier today, but she still runs across the city to the conservatory where she is a student. She readily slips into one of the campus bathrooms. As she hurries past the mirrors, Claire stops and removes her earphones. She sees the glowing pink in her cheeks, the sweat crowning her black hair, and she ducks her face under one of the sink faucets to thaw under warm water. Before she runs out of time, she changes quickly in a stall, into her formal clothes. She’s done this before about 50 times and she is 23 years old, but today, Claire feels different. She felt it in her dreams the night before, and how she couldn’t pace herself while running over here, how she suddenly took different paths instead of the ones she’s always taken since she moved to this country.
Down the hall, Claire hears students practicing their scales and tuning their instruments. Violins. Cellos. Clarinets. Oboes. She hears someone playing “13 pieces, Op. 76: No.2” by Sibelius somewhere. And she remembers coming to London for the first time, only a few years ago, when she could barely speak a word of English. Her fingers spoke for her instead, through keys and pedals. She communicated through her instrument, and as she was always a quick learner, she did pick up English rapidly, just as she had done so in her homeland with various Italian musical terms. Allegro moderato. Rallentando. Grave.
But what was the time? Claire glances at her watch. She’ll arrive at the charity event during intermission, right after the end of the performance. She continues to jog down the marble stairway of the campus, and she is starving as she has entirely forgotten to eat lunch, but she ignores the rue in her stomach and rushes out onto a busier Gordon Street. It’s full of students, women and men in ironed suits, and tourists staring up at the buildings like lost children. Only when she reaches the back of a towering brick building does Claire finally stop running to find the pianist she’ll be interpreting for.
In the carpeted lobby, Jiyoung sits in a wheelchair. She wears a sleeveless chiffon blue dress and is flanked by the journalists. The men, Max and Ewan, wave at Claire and walk over energetically towards her, but all Claire notices from afar is the glass in Jiyoung’s eyes, the milky centers reminiscent of fresh snow. The hem of Jiyoung’s dress drapes over her bony, tilted legs like a sick child’s blanket and Claire looks away, then back again. Jiyoung is blind. Claire’s eyes then flicker to Jiyoung’s hands lying peacefully in her lap as Claire hides her own, which tremble behind her back.
“Claire,” Max says. “You missed a beautiful performance.”
“I’m sure it was lovely.”
“Thanks very much for stepping in at the last minute,” Ewan says. “Her interpreter had an emergency come up.”
They all walk back to Jiyoung together. Max is the first one to speak.
“Jiyoung, your new interpreter has arrived. Her name is Claire and she’s also a pianist at the music school just around the corner. She’s been helping interpret interviews for us, about the refugee experience.”
Claire interprets Max’s English into Korean, then quickly introduces herself to Jiyoung. Claire speaks articulately in her South Korean dialect, and strangely, she thinks of the Italian word lontano – distant, far away. Jiyoung smiles. Max and Ewan begin to talk to each other about how the event will proceed, and like a curious finch, Jiyoung turns her head towards Claire.
“I hate that word.”
Her northern dialect strikes Claire immediately.
“I’m sorry?”
“Refugee,” Jiyoung says. “I know that word in English now. And I know they’ve all been calling me the refugee pianist.” Her pearly eyes blink fast. “Your accent. Are you from Seoul?”
Claire takes a moment. “Somewhere around there.”
Jiyoung’s smile grows. “So you’re a piano student and you just do this during your spare time? A little grim, no?”
“I enjoy volunteering.”
“Because you feel sorry for us too?”
Jiyoung rolls her wheelchair closer, but Claire is thankful that Max and Ewan say that it’s time. Max guides Jiyoung in her wheelchair down the glossy corridor that leads to a large white auditorium, then up a ramp and back onto the stage. The audience slowly return from the intermission and find their seats, and Claire sits next to Jiyoung, just a few feet away from the piano that Jiyoung had just played. Ewan jogs in front of them, adjusts his camera lens, and begins clicking away.
“Now if you could all just smile here, please, before we begin the interview,” he says. “Brilliant.”
Claire has done this before, interpreting North Korean refugee testimonies for similar charity events, but she has never interpreted for another pianist. She is a favorite contact among the local London journalists because of her speed and, as one reporter put it, her composure when disclosing harrowing stories is unmatched. It’s as though none of it surprises her, and in truth, it does not, but as an interpreter, she believes it’s not her job to convey every emotion. She is merely a messenger.
But today, in the white auditorium, in between the words she begins to interpret for both Max and Jiyoung, Claire’s voice rasps. She asks Ewan for a bottle of water, and she finds herself digging her fingernails into her palm while Jiyoung speaks.
It’s odd. Claire sees the white cranes stretching their wings at sunrise; hears the children’s footsteps, their laughter, the clang of her mother’s scraped pots in the kitchen. And yet the sharpest pain hits when she begins to hear the music of her childhood, as though they are melodies prohibited in her heart, ones that will remind her of life’s dissonance. She focuses again on the interview. But with each word she must interpret, Claire pushes the microphone harder onto her lips; chooses to say bloody instead of red, nothing instead of numb, and abandoned instead of left behind.
“You didn’t realize that you couldn’t move from the waist down, once you crossed the North Korean border into China,” Max says to Jiyoung onstage, “where you were then tortured and lost your vision.”
“I was shot multiple times in the legs when I first escaped, yes.”
Claire’s fingernails are now cutting into her skin, but she doesn’t flinch. As she interprets for Jiyoung, Claire sees the mouth of a silver river at night. The auditorium grows quiet.
“But at least they didn’t chop off my hands,” Jiyoung replies, before flashing a smile. “Or else you all wouldn’t have had a concert today.”
Max stares down at his notecards and laughs uncomfortably once Claire finishes interpreting, but Claire is unable to look away from Jiyoung’s eyes. She hears footsteps crushing the dirt, going north, then west.
“Now this is the fascinating part.” Max sits taller now. “It was secretly listening to Debussy that made you want to leave North Korea?”
Claire runs her tongue across the back of her teeth as she delivers the message. She feels that Jiyoung understands the question before it’s even interpreted. There is a heated stillness in the air. Then Jiyoung replies that only through music can she find a way to express herself. And that whenever she plays, like she had done earlier today on this very stage, her music connects her to her family. “A portal,” Claire interprets into English for Max and the audience, “that transcends.” Jiyoung mentions her father, with whom she fled in the middle of the night and ran for the river, but who was later killed when the border guards shot him in the head. Her mother, dragged behind and thrown into an internment camp.
Claire sees a girl clawing her pale hands into the filthy mud as she drags herself into China. The soldiers guarding the borders yell. Her father cries. Shots fire in the dark. And the girl says nothing at all.
And when Jiyoung stares at Claire onstage, for a brief moment, Claire forgets that Jiyoung is now blind. Claire thinks Jiyoung can see who she is.
-
On the Tube back to Finsbury Park, after the event, Claire closes her eyes in exhaustion and sees her father again. He rushes her outside at night and says they must go, that it’s no longer safe. The strain in his voice. That startling strain.
She listens to the same recording of Debussy’s “Rêverie” that her father made her listen to with the same earphones at night, the recording of a performance at the Royal Albert Hall that she listens to whenever she runs; a gift he smuggled home from a work trip in Moscow. Claire lets herself in her flat, sits on her bed and swirls her fingers to the trickling rhythm.
She wonders if he regretted not becoming an orchestra conductor instead of working for the government. She sees him gently lifting her small hands and making waves to each crescendo, to each dip of a diminuendo, without saying a word. One earphone in her ear and the other in his, together basking in a private symphony meant only for them. She hears her nervous mother whispering, begging them to throw away the recording before the neighbors find out, that it is just a matter of time with all his antics. A ticking bomb. Or just a metronome. What kind of father would let his daughter listen to illegal music from another country, performed by the enemy, risking them all? But what kind of father wouldn’t let his daughter listen to this?
Hours pass, and it’s hard for her to fall asleep at night, but slowly she begins to drift. As her eyes surrender to sleep, Claire thinks she hears her father walk in. He says nothing as he kneels down next to her, clasps the tape recording into her hands, and kisses them for the last time.
-
It is the second and final day of the charity event, and Claire is there. But she has, again, skipped the part where Jiyoung plays the piano for the audience, and this time, Max and Ewan are not present. Instead, there are more journalists Claire doesn’t recognize, more faces with more cameras, and Jiyoung is photographed at every angle. Claire doesn’t interpret for Jiyoung when someone shouts, “How does it feel to be getting all this attention as a refugee pianist?”
“You’re famous,” Claire simply whispers to Jiyoung as they make their way to another room.
“You should have been there when I performed earlier today. They couldn’t get enough of me.”
They laugh together, but Claire doesn’t tell Jiyoung that she cannot bear to hear her play. It would be asking too much of her, to sit down and listen to those songs. Seeing her up there like that. As the journalists continue with their remaining questions, and as Claire interprets for everyone, she wonders if this was all a terrible mistake. She hasn’t practiced her own music for the last few days, and there is a bitter taste in her mouth. The taste of being used for a spectacle, when she is a musician. A pianist. She thinks that she should have never agreed to interpret for Jiyoung, especially when, after the event concludes, Jiyoung asks Claire to accompany her to the train station. If she would like to sit with her for a coffee before she leaves for Paris, where her next string of concerts and charity events await, and someone else will assist as her interpreter.
“Is it ever tiring, what you’re doing?” Claire asks. They are now at King’s Cross station, and Claire pushes Jiyoung’s wheelchair.
“It’s tedious speaking to everyone, but I want them to hear my music. And I want them to know that I’m more than this. They always think they know.”
Claire finds a cafe in the station. They sit together as they drink their coffees. Claire sees all the people making their way across the terminal and to their platforms. Fashionable women, elderly couples, students, and young families walking with such assurance. Behind her, Claire hears the barista preparing more takeaway coffees, and she sees in the corner of her eye, two toddler twins dressed in green corduroy overalls, fighting over a cupcake, while their mother glares at her phone. A few meters down from where they are sitting, a boy sits down at the public piano in the middle of the station and begins to play a song Claire doesn’t recognize.
“Thank you,” Jiyoung says.
“For what?”
“Your words.”
“They’re yours, really.”
“But I noticed it was hard for you sometimes. On stage.”
“What do you mean?”
“I could feel it when you became quiet. As though you were remembering something. Or had forgotten it.”
“Silence,” Claire carefully replies, “is a language too.”
Jiyoung pauses. “How long have you played the piano?”
“Since I was a child.”
“Isn’t it wild? You were only miles south from where I was, and we were probably both playing the piano at the same time in two different countries. And now we’re here.”
“It’s true,” Claire says. She laughs. “It’s insane.”
“It is. Because I feel like I know you from somewhere.”
Claire sits up now. She is afraid that Jiyoung will want to touch her face to see her.
“The songs I played, they’re from when I was growing up,” Jiyoung says, freely. “Songs I played with my family.”
The resemblance is uncanny. Claire finds herself studying Jiyoung’s face, and she thinks of how much she resembles her younger sister. Her sister who was asleep next to her when their father clasped the Debussy recording into her hands, then kissed them; her sister, who then sat up and asked to listen to it together in the dark, who said that she also wanted to be a pianist and play around the world, whose hand slipped out of Claire’s at night when they crossed the river on the border to escape, who disappeared under the dark current without making a sound. How the deafening guilt made Claire an interpreter of silence.
“Why did you come here?” Jiyoung asks.
“It was my sister’s idea. She wanted us to come out here and study music.”
“She lives here?”
“Yes,” Claire lies.
“That must be nice,” Jiyoung says, smiling now, “to not be alone.”
“Yes,” Claire replies. “Absolutely.”
Joanna Hong is a writer and translator from Los Angeles and the daughter of Korean immigrants.
In 2021, she was a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in Fiction and received support from Poets & Writers and The Readership through their Open Door Career Advancement Grant.
In 2023, her fiction was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and she was a finalist for the LANDO grant from The de Groot Foundation. She is currently represented by Melissa Danaczko at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency. She has a BA from Pitzer College in European Studies and Italian, and an MA from University College London in Human Rights.
Her work in journalism and translation has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Dazed & Confused and other outlets.
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