by Pamela Morsi
The truth was that Lumkee had long since ceased being "small town America." It was suburbia with a small core of tourist-friendly streets kept like a living museum of the 1950s.
But it was what had kept the downtown from dying completely. There were lots of little communities, once Lumkee's rivals, that were now nearly deserted, their buildings boarded up and their young families moving elsewhere. We were close enough to Tulsa to have been swallowed up by it. Yet, we had enough local people who wanted the old Lumkee to linger that we'd managed to save a few vestiges of the past.
I drove down the alley to my parking place behind the back door. Hye Won came out of her store immediately, as if she'd been watching for me. She approached me carrying some papers. I gave her a big grin, but she wasn't smiling.
"Good morning, Mr. Braydon. I hope that you and your family are well."
Her words and the expression of her greeting were very formal, as if we hadn't been friends and business associates for years.
"We're fine," I told her. "Is everything okay at your house?"
She nodded but didn't elaborate on that.
"My father and mother have asked me to convey their abject apologies," she said. "They will not be at their jobs today, and they have asked me to humbly present these letters of resignation."
I accepted the proffered papers and quickly glanced through them. They were formal and generic, without complaint or explanation.
I glanced up at Hye Won. She gave me a little nod as if our discussion was finished.
"Wait," I insisted. "This is about Jin and Nate, isn't it?"
She didn't say anything and her expression was unreadable.
I took a deep breath, trying to figure out what to say.
"I can only apologize for my son," I finally managed. "I am very sorry if Nate's behavior has...has insulted your family or... dishonored your sister. I... they are grown, adult people. I..."
Hye Won held up her hand and shook her head.
"Please Mr. Braydon," she said. "Do not concern yourself with this. My father does not hold you accountable for any bad behavior. It is not that at all."
"Then what is it?"
"It's hard to explain," she said. "It is very Korean.
The relationship between our families is now forever changed. My father cannot be employed by the family of his daughter's lover. It just cannot be done. It would be a shame and an embarrassment for him. I am sorry."
So that was it. Mr. and Mrs. Chai never set foot in Okie Tamales again. Their son Chano came in that afternoon to retrieve their personal items from their lockers. He requested that their last paychecks be mailed.
The rest of the Korean staff showed up on time, but most immediately gave notice. They didn't want to work for me. They had only stayed because they worked for Mr. Chai. I managed to convince them, with bonuses, to stretch out their termination dates so that I would have time to hire replacement staff.
The last of the Korean employees were gone by the first of June. I was employing anybody that I could. Over the summer, it was mostly high school kids. But the wonderful life I'd been leading, with a dependable, hardworking, trustworthy production line, was a thing of the past.
Not that non-Koreans weren't good workers. Many were. But the commitment to a difficult, monotonous job was hard to maintain. The turnover was constant. I eventually found three middle-aged women who I could count on to stay, and they kept the revolving door of other employees trained. But I was now fulltime production manager as well as working sales, delivery, human resources and payroll. Twelve to fourteen-hour days now became the norm.
The Chais bought a small building across the street. It had been a dry cleaners when I was a kid. For the last several years it had been a gift shop. They opened a small grocery. The bins of produce were kept out on the sidewalk. That was a good idea since the interior of the place, crowded with merchandise, was hardly big enough for a half dozen customers. It was quite a contrast to the huge supermarkets where we all shopped. I was certain that nobody would come downtown to buy groceries.
And I couldn't understand why the Chais didn't just retire. Their oldest son was married now, well off and appeared quite capable of supporting them. Hye Won had a thriving business as well and looked after her parents in her own home. Chano was graduating high school. Although he wasn't brilliant, like the rest of the kids, he was a good-looking, affable guy. Plenty smart enough for any reasonable purpose. He'd gotten an athletic scholarship to run track at Kansas State.
And there was Jin. Jin was living at our house. She and Nate were still not married. I couldn't begin to know what was going on between those two. But with Lauren off to school and mainly involved in saving the world, Corrie and Jin had somehow become very close.
"We have mo-jeong," Corrie explained to me one night as she sat up in bed reading. Her stack of books on Korean history and culture was on the bedside table.
"Moo-junk?" I asked. "Is that like the Korean word for bullshit?”
She gave me a look, not appreciating my humor at all.
"Mo-jeong,” she corrected. "It's a bond of trust between two people. Jin and I recognize that we are inevitably connected by ties of caring, respect and nurturing."
I nodded.
"You're really getting into this Korean stuff, huh?"
"It just helps me understand what's going on so much better” she said. "So much of Korean culture is left unsaid. They all understand what's meant, but those of us from Western culture are just clueless."
I shrugged.
"Weren't you confused about the Chais' attitude to Jin finishing her semester at Syracuse?"
"Yeah," I admitted. "It would have been stupid to drop out in April when she could easily do two more months of school and have that many more credits toward her degree."
"That's what I thought exactly," Corrie said. "As long as she's healthy, she should finish the courses she'd signed up for. The Chais are so keen on education, I thought they should see that. But in Korean culture they believe that the lessons the baby is learning inside the mother's womb are as important as the first ten years of education after birth. They want the mothers-to-be to refrain from stressful endeavors, live in peaceful surroundings, read only good literature, look at beautiful pictures and eat colorful, exquisitely prepared food. Knowing this, of course, they wouldn't want her to return to a dorm room, eating in the cafeteria and knuckling down to the rigors of education."
"The Chais are very smart people," I pointed out. "They wouldn't believe all this stupid stuff like a pregnant woman looking at beautiful pictures and reading good books helps the baby."
"What about that finding on classical music?" she asked me. "Now the pregnant American moms are playing Mozart with the headphones on their belly because they think it makes the child's brain form more intricate neural connections, which will raise the kid's math scores ten years later."
“Okay, maybe there is something to that," I said.
“Besides, it's a difficult and confusing time for Jin's family," Corrie said. "In difficult and confusing times, we all fall back on what we know and what we perceive as familiar."
Around my house, there was very little that I perceived as familiar. Jin had moved into Nate's room, which Corrie had totally redecorated in pale yellow. The curtains and bedding were patterned in Asian- style flowers. Nate had been banished to his workshop, where he'd carved out a corner for his own living quarters. I didn't know if his living separately had to do with them not being married or was more of the Korean birth preparation.
On September 28 at 3:55 in the afternoon, Makayla Moon Braydon was born at Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa. She weighed six pounds, five ounces.
Mr. Chai, Jin's brother, Song, and I spent about three hours hanging around the waiting room together. Mr. Chai was open, friendly, cheerful—just as I remembered him when he used to work for me. Song carried most of the conversation. He had been in this very room only six weeks earlier when his wife gave birth to th
eir firstborn son.
Nate and all the women were all in the labor room with Jin. Corrie had studied for this day as if it were a final exam. She was determined to win over the entire Chai family and heal the breach between Jin and her mother by being rigorously attentive to the taegyo and samchilil. Whether that actually worked or not, I don't know. But in the three weeks after Makayla came home from the hospital, Mrs. Chai or Hye Won were in my house more than I was.
I had snuck home from work one afternoon, to try to get caught up on paperwork without being interrupted from the production floor every five minutes. Mrs. Chai had left early and Hye Won wasn't coming over until after the drugstore closed. Corrie was watching over the new mother and baby. She came into the family room where I was sitting at her little home-office desk.
“Jin and the baby are both asleep. I've got to run to the store for more diapers,” she told me. “Here's the monitor." She plunked down a piece of blue-and-white plastic that looked like a teddy bear walkie- talkie. “If she calls for anything, just tell her I'll be right back. Don't let her get out of bed!"
The not-out-of-bed thing was Korean. She was supposed to recover for three weeks. Corrie had recovered in three days. But she was now completely committed to these ancient rules from the Koryo dynasty.
“Okay," I said. “If she needs something, I'll help her."
It was only a few minutes later when I heard a voice on the monitor.
“Who's there?" Jin asked.
"It's Sam, honey," I answered. "What do you need?"
“Was that Corrie's car I heard leaving?"
“She went to get diapers," I said. “She'll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes."
There was a long pause.
“Do you need something?"
"Sam, I'm going to jump into the shower real quick," she said. “If you hear the baby cry, come up and check on her."
“You're going to take a shower?" Corrie had explained that not only were traditional Korean mothers not supposed to get out of bed, there were no showers or bathing for twenty-one days.
"Are you sure you want to do that?" I asked her.
"I promise not to wash my hair," she said. "But I've just got to shower. When it comes to that, I think there's more Oklahoma in me than Korea."
"I won't tell if you won't tell," I said.
Neither of us did and as far as I know, no one ever suspected, though I'm pretty sure Jin sneaked several more showers before her time was up.
Once her lying-in was completed, Jin and Makayla, or Little Mac as Nate and I called her, became the center of our family life. Corrie had taken the year off from teaching to be at home with the new baby. And I think we both found grandparenting as freeing and energizing as parenting had been confining and exhausting.
Little Mac was the prettiest, sweetest, most intelligent baby I'd seen since our own were tiny. And she was loaded for bear with personality. Charming, funny, gleeful, stubborn, willful and rebellious. Exactly the kind of kid you would expect to get from having Nate and Jin as parents!
Finally, since apparently nobody else would, I broached the subject of marriage.
"So when are you two going to tie the knot?" I asked one snowy, cold winter afternoon when everything in town was closed up for bad weather.
Little Mac was sitting in her jiggle seat, a sort of vibrating sling chair, looking around as we all watched her inspecting us.
"That's really none of your business, Dad," Nate said.
His words were not angry or disrespectful, but I was stung by them, anyway. Jin tried to soften the blow.
"There's no hurry," she assured me. "Everything is going so well, why would we want to mess that up?"
"Well," I said, "maybe because it's nice for mommies and daddies to be married to each other. You don't want her having to explain things to her little classmates in kindergarten."
"By the time Little Mac gets to kindergarten," Nate said, "most of the kids in her class won't be from families with two married parents."
He was probably right, but I didn't like it anyway.
"Nate, I know you've made a life out of never doing anything that we want you to do," I said. "But this is not about getting my goat or acting out against your mother and me. You are somebody's father now. You can't be that and still act as irresponsible as a kid."
Nate glowered at me, preparing for a sharp comeback, when Jin reached a hand over and touched my arm.
"It's not Nate," she said. "He's taking the blame for me. But it's not him. I'm the one who's just not sure."
She looked down at Little Mac and then back at me.
"There is so much that I want for my life," she said. "Things that I can't have here in Lumkee. I'm not ready to give up on that. If I marry Nate, then I'm giving up."
Her defense was admirable. And I knew there was some truth to it. But I looked into Nate's eyes and knew this wasn't the whole truth.
31
Corrie
1999
I had always thought that I loved teaching more than anything. But I soon found out that I loved being home with Makayla most of all. Jin was a very good mother. She did parenting the way she did everything else, consistently overachieving. Because I didn't have to worry that any of the baby's physical, emotional or spiritual needs were not being met, I could concentrate on just loving the stuffing out of her!
Mrs. Chai, Jin's mother, who now allowed me to call her Cho Kyon, was attached to her, too. But she had her grandson, Michael, Song's little boy, with whom to share her time.
I was very hopeful of having a Korean-American wedding very soon, and I read everything I could on the subject. And I put together a folder of ideas and cultural trivia that might be helpful when the time came.
I was able to utilize some of it, but not exactly as I had hoped. Hye Won had finally been introduced to the right young man and a hasty wedding was in the offing.
David Kim was shorter than Hye Won, not nearly as smart, and as the minister at a small Korean Presbyterian church in Oklahoma City, he had much less earning potential. But I liked him.
Jin didn't feel the same.
"Hye Won is selling out," Jin informed me. "She's afraid that she'll never marry, so she's settling for this major loser. The only reason she'd give this guy the time of day is that he's Korean."
"Did she tell you that?"
"No," she answered. "She says that he's perfect for her. That he's the guy she's been waiting for all her life. But I don't believe her. He's Korean. She's only marrying him because he's Korean."
Jin's certainty about that struck me as a bit of "thou doth protest too much," and I wondered how much Nate's not being Korean actually worked against her willingness to commit to him.
I also worried about Nate's willingness to commit to her. Of course, I had heard Jin tell Sam that she was the one who didn't want to marry. But I saw no evidence that my son was ready to make any vows. In fact, he seemed to be extremely content with his life and eager for things to continue exactly as they were.
He worked in his workshop doing what he liked. His father provided the roof over his head and the food on his table. He was back inside the house again with his beautiful live-in girlfriend who put few demands on his time. And his happy, healthy baby girl could be safely left anytime for free baby-sitting with his mother.
Nate was a very fortunate young man. I was afraid he would never take on the responsibilities of a husband and father. Why should he bother?
In April, Lauren brought home a new boyfriend for the weekend. Actually, she called him her "gentleman friend," I suppose because it was difficult to consider him a boy.
Gilkison Oberfeld was nearing forty, closer in age to Sam and myself than to Lauren. While we were aware of that, it seemed to have escaped our daughter's attention. He was tall and slim. His hair was thinning on top and the sides were showing hints of gray. But he was well dressed in expensive clothes and wore a big diamond ring with a lodge emblem.
She had met Oberfe
ld at her church in Waco. He was a businessman and investments counselor, successful and conservative. He had opinions on everything and he wasn't hesitant about sharing them.
Lauren cornered me in the kitchen in the first fifteen minutes that he was there.
"Don't mention Bill Clinton, affirmative action or immigration," she warned. "He's a really kind, good, Christian man. But he has some very strongly held beliefs and I wouldn't want him to get off on the wrong foot with my family."
We tiptoed around him as best we could, discussing the weather and how Tulsa compared with Waco, his business and the more favorable tax structures in Texas over Oklahoma. We also covered the stock market and how more money could be made investing in stocks than in small business. I asked him questions about his family.
"My father grew up on a ranch near Schulenburg. They're Germans, but they've been in this country practically since the Alamo was new," he joked to me. “And my mama—" he shook his head incredulously “—my mama's family is what passes for royalty in east Texas."
He seemed to think this was very funny. We all laughed politely.
"Braydon is an English name," he informed us. "As is Maynard, your maiden name, Corrie."
"My family seems to think they are some Scot-Irish mix," I told him. "I don't think Sam knows much about his heritage."
"You really should take an interest," Gilkison suggested. "I know it's not politically correct to talk about bloodlines. But science is learning more and more about genetics. It's proving that who we turn out to be is as dependant upon our heritage as we always thought it was."
Neither Sam nor I made a comment on that.
"This spinach dish is wonderful, Mom," Lauren piped in. "You'll have to give me the recipe."
"Jin made it," I told her.
Lauren glanced down to the end of the table where Jin sat feeding Makayla, who was in her high chair.