Excerpt from The Blue House Raid
Lee Min-hee watch a reading
The bus disgorged its passengers in a square in front of a bar with a sign in English letters. Min-hee knew from Papasan’s directions that this was the Lucky Club. She put her back to the midday sun and walked north on the chalky main street to where a second wide dirt road ran off to the left, down a slope toward, she knew, the Imjin River. To her right, on top of the T formed by this intersection, crouched another GI establishment, the Half Moon Club. Min-hee’s new home was a room behind the Half Moon, but first she wanted to view the famous river and the combat zone on the far side.
The road to the river had a modest slope. Like the main street, its edges sprouted clubs and working girls. At the river, the ground dropped away in a precipice. A thin span of steel and concrete with an American name, Libby Bridge, ran straight to the high embankment on the other side of the waterway. On the near side squatted a guard shack manned by American military police. On the far side, Min-hee could make out sandbagged bunkers with protruding machine guns.
Min-hee walked to the left side of the military police shack and looked down upon the broad waters of the Imjin River. From a map she’d seen, she knew it flowed southwest, taking many twists and turns and a half loop before entering the Han Estuary and the Yellow Sea forty kilometers away. She thought back ten years to lessons of geography and history, before she understood the meaning of being a second daughter where none were wanted.
Min-hee turned away from the embankment, placed her bundle on her head, and retraced her steps up the road. She crossed the main street to the Half Moon Club and found her papasan out back in an alleyway with verandas and rooms similar to Dongducheon. He slid open the door to the fourth room—linoleum floor, papered walls and ceiling, bed, nightstand, and wardrobe.