Flight to Freedom
Page 14
Like a goddess she was, like the apsaras of old that we were supposed to be, her gestures so precise and graceful that one flowed naturally into another. It looked so effortless, these subtle dance movements, and yet I knew it took years of disciplined training to do properly.
I felt a firm hand behind my shoulder, straightening it. Without turning I knew it was the dance teacher. I let her realign my arms too, and tried to keep that precise stance locked in my mind, while she moved back to correct the dancer behind me.
Then the teacher clapped her hands sharply, twice, signaling the end of the training session. The group of some fifty girls relaxed and started to disperse. As the dance teacher passed by, she reached out and touched my shoulder, so lightly it was barely a pat, but for that instant, she was not my teacher but my mother again. I smiled, knowing that Mother had noticed how well I had danced just now.
We were the lucky ones, I thought, Teeda and I, to have our own mother as our dance teacher. Our lessons would continue even after we left the palace grounds. Mother made us rehearse at home too, deftly tapping or twisting our stances closer to perfection. At this rate, I knew that Teeda would soon realize her dream. Some moonlit evening, she would be sewn into shimmering brocades, and as the musicians played on their flutes and drums and bamboo xylophones, she would perform the part of an apsara, a celestial dancer, before a rapt audience.
Quietly now, we waited until the last dancers had filed out of the pavilion, and then Teeda, my mother, and I slipped into our sandals and walked out down the steps into the garden, then through a side gate of the palace walls back into the outside world.
The street outside seemed even more crowded and bustling than usual. Cars, buses, trishaws, and bicycles churned past, as people hurried along the sidewalks, weaving their way around the baskets of fruits and flowers set out by the street vendors.
A basket of lotus blossoms caught my eye, their pale pink a reflection of the twilight sky.
“Let’s buy some!” I said, tugging at my mother. “We need some as temple offerings for the New Year.” I could sense my mother weakening. As flowers sacred to Buddhism, we had always been taught that because the lotus had its roots in the mud, grew through the murky water, and blossomed in the open air, each lotus was like the human spirit.
“And we could use them to practice our apsara dance movements with you at home,” Teeda added.
Relenting, our mother selected the freshest bouquet of lotuses, and hurriedly paid for them.
“You didn’t bargain,” I said, surprised.
“I want to get home before dark!” she snapped.
The shadows were lengthening as we turned down the little side street that led to our house. When we arrived at our wooden gate, I was surprised that it was latched. I jiggled it, but it wouldn’t open.
“It’s locked,” my father said, appearing behind it with my little brother, Yann. They must have been waiting for us, I realized. He unlocked a padlock around the latch.
“Pa! You’re home so early,” Teeda said. “Is something wrong?” He ignored the question, and ushered us inside, before locking the gate again.
“And why the lock?” I asked.
“Hush!” Ma said. “Just to be safe, that’s all!”
But I did not feel safe. That night, I heard the sound of bombs falling again. Closer they were, and clearer than I had ever heard them, all through the night and into the morning.
At dawn, I was startled by a loud crashing sound. Was it thunder, or bombs? I tried to rouse myself; Teeda had said we should roll under the bed for cover if the bombs dropped really close by. Should I do that now? The explosions continued, on and on, and I imagined our house blowing up, collapsing around me. I jerked awake, breathing hard.
Finding My Hat
By John Son
Jin-Han Park’s story opens with his first memory: losing his hat to the wind on a blustery Chicago street. Though he never gets the hat back, Jin-Han, like his family searching for their place in America, never stops looking for other hats to try on. Creative, fragile, and funny, Jin-Han is a perceptive, observant narrator.
Debut novelist John Son chronicles Jin-Han’s and the Park family’s travels from city to city, through triumph, humor, and tragedy, as they search for a better life and a little more money. In a series of fluid, memorable vignettes laced with Korean words and timeless themes, Son builds a rich canvas, revealing a life at once unique and indistinguishable from any other.
An excerpt from Finding My Hat:
LOSING
MY
HAT
The sudden silence of the street we’d turned onto, Uhmmah’s gloved hand tightening around mine.
It’s the first thing I remember—two years old, huffing along on short, stubby legs, trying to keep up with Uhmmah’s heels clicking against the pavement. Empty paper cups skittered along the curb, sheets of newspaper fluttered around parking meters. Steel and concrete buildings shot up into blue sky. A gust of wind sweeping down the street left us shivering into our scarves, dust and grit needling our eyes. Suddenly my head felt lighter, and I blinked up to see my hat rising above us. “Oh!” cried Uhmmah, throwing her hand up after it, but the little brown acorn top she’d knitted was already out of reach. Our necks bent back, we watched it climb higher and higher, quickly a small dot, then gone over a distant roof. We gaped at the empty space where it had vanished, as if someone might throw it back. When no one did, I turned to Uhmmah to see what I should do. She looked down at me and raised her brows with a smile. I raised my brows, too, but my mouth stayed “Oh!”
“It’s gone!” she said, her dark brown eyes as wide as the “Oh!” of my mouth, and then she shook her head and laughed until she noticed I wasn’t laughing with her. She leaned down to tighten my scarf and kissed her nose to mine. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll get you another one.”
And she would. I’ve got all these embarrassing pictures to prove it. Bright red cowboy hats, things with puffy white pom-poms on top, caps with earflaps. Early on you could see the importance headgear would play in my life.
PRACTICE
“Uhmmah?”
We were sitting at the dining table. I was chopping onions in the onion chopper while Uhmmah got ready to make mandu.
“Mmm?”
“I think I want to quit piano.”
She stopped pinching the dumpling she was closing. “Moh rah gooh? After all the time and money we put into it?”
“I know,” I said. “But I want to stop now. I’m tired of doing it. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
“But why do you want to stop now? We’ve spent all that money on lessons. I work six days a week to send you and Jin-Soo to a good school. My feet are always sore. My back aches. I’m becoming an old woman too soon. You need to go to a good school and make lots of money so that I can stop working. It was your idea to start taking lessons, anyway, remember?”
“But I was too young then!” I said. “I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Aigoo,” she said, shaking her head. She finished closing her mandu and set it on the tray of mandu that was ready to be boiled. She started on another one. “Are you finished with that yet?” I opened the onion chopper and showed her. She took it from me and spooned out the onions and kneaded it into the pork that went into the mandu.
“Okay?” I said.
“Be quiet!” she said. “Don’t talk such nonsense.”
“Uhmmah!” I said. “God!” And made a frustrated sound and rolled my eyes as I got up and went to my room.
I fell back onto my bed and picked up the latest book I was reading, The Catcher in the Rye. I’d seen an older kid at church reading it while Father Kolba went on with his usual somethings. If he thought it was worth getting caught reading it in church, I had to check it out. I wasn’t halfway through it yet but I already felt the cold of New York like I’d lived there all my life. And though I didn’t understand what exactly the narrator was so upset about, because every
other word was a swear word, I felt like I knew what he was going through. It was partly why I wanted to quit piano lessons. I’d been doing it for almost eight years and hated having to practice every night. It meant more to Uhmmah than to me. I felt like it was one of the reasons why I’d chickened out with Lucinda. If I did regular things like other kids did, maybe I would’ve asked her out. Maybe Uhmmah would’ve understood how American kids went on dates and dropped us off at the movies, and in the middle of a big love scene I would’ve leaned over and kissed Lucinda like I could only imagine doing. Instead, I spent my days after school in the back of a wig store. Something nobody understood when I told them that was what my parents did—owned a wig store. Where finally, after years of thinking about it in the back of my mind, I took a bald mannequin head in my hands one day, wiped off her lips, and gently, slowly, practiced for the real thing.
Other First Person Fiction titles:
Behind the Mountains
by Edwidge Danticat
The Stone Goddess
by Minfong Ho
Finding My Hat
by John Son
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This book was originally published in hardcover by Orchard Books in 2002.
Copyright © 2002 by Ana Veciana-Suarez. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
E-ISBN: 978-0-545-23121-3