Page 36 of The Last Tiger

A spring wind nips at my neck and my exposed ankles, sending a shiver through my body. My pants are several centimeters too short, thanks to my growth spurt last year.

For some reason, the Tiger spirit’s words come back to me.

I chose you, Seung, because you have suffered.

For the first time, I’m thinking that maybe it’s a blessing that I grew up the way I did.

Because I’m accustomed to being cold and hungry.

A three-day journey is nothing compared to a lifetime of bitter winters, nights in the gold mine, riceless nights.

I imagine one of the yangban out here, complaining loudly and sniffling.

Someone accustomed to a different lifestyle might not fare so well in the wild.

Not to mention, someone like them wouldn’t possess the desperation—the determination —that Jin and I have. The willingness we have to risk our lives trying to change the world for the better.

I watch Jin pick at her bread.

“Hunger can make us do terrible things,” I whisper, my thoughts falling back to the officer.

“Chill out. It was two bean buns—”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

“Hey, Seung. Look at me.” Jin moves toward me, placing her hand on my head and swiveling so I’m facing her. “Don’t waste our time feeling sorry for yourself, or anyone else. You didn’t do anything wrong. Okay? Anger is the right response to injustice.”

I pause, unsure what to think.

“But the spirit said—”

“Forget what the spirit said. Of course she has to say that. She’s a guardian spirit.

But we are humans. We have to fight. Whatever lies in that cave ahead is the key to unlocking your powers and freeing the Tiger people.

For that, I’m willing to do anything. And you should be too.

” She places a firm hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t doubt your anger, Seung. It’s the most important fuel you’ll ever have. ”

I have to admit. It feels good to have permission to feel angry.

She’s so sure of herself and her mission. Jin intuitively understands how I feel—that impossible feeling of being crushed beneath the unbearable weight of the empire. Is she like me? Has she watched her family suffer? Is she fueled, like I am, by broken dreams?

“How did you become the leader of the Resistance, Jin?” I ask her.

Jin stares at me. “Like I said before. It’s a complicated story.”

So it’s linked to however she got her ki powers.

“Tell me?”

Jin falls quiet. I see her weighing it in her thoughts.

“Before I had the Resistance,” she says finally, “I was no one. I had no family name, because I had no family. I lived in an orphanage till I was six, when it went bankrupt and we all got tossed out onto the street. I was homeless, an abandoned child, begging for scraps…I was invisible. No one looked at me twice.”

A dense, black cloud passes over her brow. It flashes with lightning as some memory comes to her.

“So obviously, I was never that trusting to begin with. But I was stupid. I was naive. I got duped, in the worst way,” she goes on.

“I signed up for this job posting—the empire said they were looking for girls for manufacturing jobs in the factories near the border. I was rounded up along with the other girls who signed up, and we were shipped off to the front lines of the war, deep in the Serpent Queendom. This was long before I had ki powers.”

Her voice darkens. “Turns out, the Dragon Army didn’t have real jobs for us.

What they had in mind was something they called being ‘comfort women.’ The reality was that we were raped every day.

Some days by as many as thirty or forty different soldiers.

Until we either died or became too shattered to ‘serve’ anymore. ”

The night air turns colder. Jin speaks so matter-of-factly, her tone of voice hardly showing any sign of the grief inside her.

“I was fourteen years old,” Jin says.

She doesn’t cry. In fact, her expression hardly changes. Except for the way her gaze has gone empty and faraway. And for the stiffness in her shoulders, which almost look so brittle she could snap.

A black cloud reappears over her shoulders. It flashes with lightning.

“One day I couldn’t take it anymore,” Jin continues. “I stole a knife from the belt of a soldier and hid it in my dress. I was going to use it to kill myself, but then I had a flash of insight. Of anger . Why should I be the one to die when it was them who had done this to me?

“When the next soldier came in, I stuck the knife in his throat. Then I ran. I ran as far and long as I could.

“There was a Serpent spirit waiting for me in the woods.”

The black cloud enveloping Jin fades for a moment. A single, yellow-orange ray of hope peeks through the cloud, illuminating her face.

“That’s how…” She shakes her head as the ray of light fades away and disappears.

“For a long time after that I didn’t want to live anymore.

What’s the point, I thought. I couldn’t rest. But then I thought of the soldier I’d killed, and I realized that he was never going to hurt anyone else ever again. And that gave me purpose.”

Jin absentmindedly picks up a small twig off the ground and starts twirling it in one hand as she speaks, gaining speed and volume.

“Before, I was a helpless street kid without a family. I was just someone else’s victim.

But now, I had ki.” She flips the twig and goes on.

“Before, I was directionless, listless, empty…

now, I had a purpose and the power to realize it.

“Ki changed my life. For the first time, I was in control. For the first time, I was the one calling the commands. It changed my whole sense of the possible.

“At first, I just wanted to take revenge on individual soldiers. To make them pull their eyes out, or skin themselves, the way that I had longed to tear away my own skin after what they’d done to me. I did do that once or twice. But it didn’t fill the hole in me.

“I realized that I had to aim higher. That I could aim higher, with my powers. A dream was born inside me: to tear down the Dragon Empire itself. I started a local branch of the Resistance. It became my everything.

“The Dragon Empire is made of monsters,” she whispers. “Human monsters. We don’t use the same rules against them. It’s okay to use your anger when you’re fighting against evil.”

She opens her mouth as if to say more, then closes it again. The silence stretches out.

“I’m going to build a new world,” Jin whispers. “A perfect one. A world without suffering.”

I watch, nearly hypnotized, as she flips the stick again.

“That anger—that voice inside you—don’t shut it down, Seung. Don’t shut it out. That voice is telling you something. What to do. Who to fight. If necessary, who to kill.”

I jump as the twig snaps. Jin falls quiet, setting the two pieces down on the earth.

I wait for her to continue, but she’s done.

“Jin,” I say, my voice breaking, “I am so sorry. For what they did to you.”

“Don’t be sorry, Lover Boy,” Jin says, smiling. The expression doesn’t reach the top half of her face. “It wasn’t your fault.”

She remains sitting regally, her back straight as a plank.

“Jin—”

“There’s a word in Tiger language,” she interrupts me, “called han . You know it?”

I nod. “It’s like…grief, anguish…”

“Han is a grief we share. The collective anguish we feel, together, at the injustices of life,” she says.

“The Dragon Empire has always called us weak—a people characterized by sadness and suffering. They say that sadness defines who we are. That we’re broken, and always have been, that we need them to fix us and make us whole.

“That’s not what han means to me,” Jin continues. She closes her eyes. “Han—that grief, that rage burning inside you—isn’t a weakness, Seung. It’s what you do with han—what you turn your grief into—that matters. How you take that anger, that resentment, that rage…and transform it into power.

“You asked me earlier why they’re doing this. Why they’re trying to erase our culture and deprive us of our history. Our sense of what makes us Tiger people. Here’s the reason: If we forget who we are, then we can be controlled.”

“Then let’s not forget,” I say. “Let’s make them remember.”

“What does it mean to be a Tiger person? What do we do, when the world tries to crush us?” Jin says, her voice breaking with emotion. “We survive .”

The storm cloud around Jin shudders, turning from black to a deep, dark blue. She turns away, to the trees. The dark blue churns over her shoulders, dropping slow raindrops.

I reach out—and rest the edge of my hand over her wrist. Jin gives the subtlest of nods back in acknowledgment.

I don’t know where it comes from. But somewhere inside, there is a reservoir of golden feeling.

I reach down into it, remembering my family, sitting around the dinner table.

There’s a watery bowl of gruel in front of each of us.

Despite the unattractive meal, we’re happy together, sharing laughter and conversation.

And maybe because of it. There’s something warm and strong and beautiful about sharing our difficulty together.

I remember Eunji, the night we got back from the woods, opening the window, looking out at the moon overhead, and the joy in her face, the purest, greatest, most beautiful joy I’d ever seen.

I reach into that warm, buttery glow. Then I pull it up—it passes down through my arm, into my fingertips, moving into Jin. Jin’s shoulders relax, then slump, as the warm feeling spreads into her, easing the blue pain over her shoulders. The rain cloud shakes, then fades.

She turns away from me and lies down on her side. I wait for a while to see if she’ll say anything more, until I realize that she’s fallen asleep.

The tiger ambles over to us and opens its mouth softly, releasing a warm yawn. I see a gentle, golden glow beam around Jin’s body before it disappears.

Then I lie down, the tiger curling up behind us, resting my own head on my hands in the dirt. I settle onto my back, gazing up at the stars.

“I’m going to master Tiger ki,” I promise myself aloud. And I mean it.

For the first time in a long time, I find that I might just have something to look forward to.

We rise early the next day and continue on our journey.

As we go, I notice something new stirring within Jin today. The golden glow from the morning sun seems to follow her, a little halo around her. She seems…happier.

As we descend a steep pass, I’m the first to break the silence.

“Your powers are unlike anything I’ve seen, Jin,” I say quietly. “Yesterday, you took out a whole troop of policemen single-handed. Have you ever tried, I dunno, just storming the capital and taking Isao out by yourself?”

“You mean, assassination ?” Jin shoots me a sly look. “One kill and Lover Boy’s already thirsty for more, huh?”

I stiffen. “I didn’t mean…”

She shrugs me off. “Of course I’ve tried. How do you think I got on those Wanted posters?”

I think back to the night that Eunji and I first visited the marketplace. 100,000 yen.

“Obviously I didn’t succeed.” Jin rolls her eyes.

“Serpent ki is all about willpower. Mine is strong. But so is Isao’s.

I wasn’t able to overpower him, or his Imperial Guard, who have been trained to withstand Serpent powers.

My powers are plenty useful against ordinary soldiers.

But against someone like Isao, they’re pretty much useless.

” Jin looks askance at the tiger. “Even Serpent ki has its limits, you know.”

As the sun ascends high in the sky and morning becomes afternoon, we make our way down one valley to another, until we reach a river that winds through the landscape on its way to the sea.

It’s deep and flows swiftly—I think I recognize it from the Tiger spirit’s vision in the cave.

Above it, a broad stone bridge traverses the river, sweeping up and over the pass.

It’s such a strange feeling, seeing something in real life that you’ve only seen before through someone else’s eyes. It feels almost like a dream.

I bend down when we reach the riverbank and drop a cupped hand into the river. Then I drink deeply and gratefully, the ice-cold water quenching my thirst.

Jin kneels down beside me and does the same. We sit there for a minute or so, marveling at the simple beauty of the water rushing over the rocks. Jin soaks up the scene quietly; I can tell she’s enjoying it too. We watch together as the tiger laps up the water beside us and licks her paws.

When we’ve drunk our fill, the three of us pick ourselves up and make our way to the bridge. For a moment, as we stand there, I’m hit by a strange feeling. A kind of ripple in the air. An ethereal, iridescent sheen wavers over the bridge, shimmering.

The tiger walks up to the bridge ahead of us, lifting her nose. The iridescent ripple in the air seems to fade away as she walks through it. Sunlight pours down from overhead.

The tiger crosses over to the other side, and the strange feeling vanishes. Jin and I follow along after her.