by Steph Cha
Grace was stupefied by her mother’s sheer masochism. All that labor, all that mortified love—God, it was just too much. It felt like a tribute to a dead person, an offering placed on a shrine with an attitude of unresolved guilt and self-punishment.
Paul started eating, and Grace followed dutifully, though she felt no hunger. Yvonne made no move to join them. Her hands were in her lap, her eyes distant.
“Yeobo,” said Paul, lowering his chopsticks. “Eat. It’s good.”
This, from Paul, was a gentle, generous concession, almost painful in its naked recognition of her need.
They ate, Yvonne picking somberly at her own cooking. The food was great—it was always great—but they were all so aware of one another that the kitchen felt close and humid and the miyeok-guk took on a fetid, sweaty flavor that canceled out Grace’s appetite.
The silence grew excruciating, and Grace was grateful when Paul switched on the TV. It was turned to one of the two Korean channels. Grace had tried to get her parents into Netflix; she’d even bought a smart TV for the house, replacing the twenty-seven-inch box they’d had since her childhood, which no one would take from them even when she listed it as free on Craigslist. But her parents said they were too old to learn. Yvonne had a few dramas that she watched as they aired; if she missed an episode, she went to the Korean video store in the Hanin Market and rented the DVD.
One of her shows was on now, a new historical drama, starring an actor Grace had last seen falling in love with his adoptive sister as she died beautifully of cancer. Grace wasn’t exactly sure what this one was about—it seemed like her parents had been watching some variation on the same palace intrigue drama for the last twenty years. Men and women in flowing hanbok, with wide sleeves and tall headdresses, whispering behind sliding paper doors. Warring princes, scheming concubines. Grace liked Korean dramas fine, but the historical ones were tricky. The Korean was formal and hard to follow, and she could never get the eras straight. There’d been a time travel one she’d gotten into for a while, but for the most part, she lost interest as soon as the folding fans and horses came out. What did she care what her ancestors were doing in another country hundreds of years ago?
The king threw a teacup at a cowering servant, and the show went to commercial. Paul changed the channel to the other Korean station—he never rested on commercials; it was like he thought he was winning something by avoiding them. The news was on, and Grace zoned out as the anchor’s melodious Korean commentary played over images of the president boarding an airplane. She could follow along if she needed to—her Korean was just good enough that she could understand it as long as she paid attention—but it didn’t seem worth the effort.
Then Alfonso Curiel’s face came on the screen. She recognized his photo—it wasn’t the school portrait from the rally, but another one that had been going around, of Curiel in a hoodie, arms crossed and staring down the camera. She was still trying to make sense of the headline—she read slowly in Korean—when the channel changed with what seemed like an audible blip, back to the other channel. A commercial was on for a local Korean appliance store, advertising special prices on rice cookers and washing machines. Grace looked at her parents. Their faces were taut. Held still. At attention.
“It’s still commercial,” she said, taking the remote from her father.
She changed the channel back. They were playing a shaky video. Grace knew what she was watching right away: bodycam footage of Curiel’s shooting. There he was, waving empty hands at Trevor Warren, then slowly moving one of them to his back pocket—to retrieve his wallet, as it turned out. The anchor narrated the scene in fast, solemn Korean, as five shots popped in quick succession. A tearful black woman came on the screen. “Remember his name,” she said, pointing at the camera. Korean subtitles ran beneath her.
The video must have just been released, though Grace couldn’t understand why. There was probably some legal explanation, but the timing seemed inflammatory, not to mention downright stupid. The grand jury decision was still brand new, the insult raw and vivid. And now here was proof that the kid was unarmed, that he’d been killed in cold blood.
Paul took the remote and flipped back to the drama, which still hadn’t come back from commercial. Grace moved her hand to take back the remote, but Paul stopped her with a warning look. She glanced at Yvonne, who was staring at her lap, practically catatonic. It was so pathetic it made Grace angry. They couldn’t even watch the news? That was too much for them to handle?
Ever since Miriam stopped talking to Yvonne—and maybe, Grace wasn’t sure anymore, for years before—the merest allusion to black people, to race or racism, brought a prickly charge to the Park home. She wondered if it was like this in other families, if her friends and their parents avoided this theme in the way they might avoid talking about sex.
Two years ago, Miriam brought home a man named Kenechi, for the sole purpose—Grace was convinced—of trolling their mother. He was the perfect tester black boyfriend for Korean parents: a clean-cut, Ivy League–educated investment banker from a middle-class immigrant family. Otherwise, he was completely wrong for Miriam, almost a caricature of a fratty finance guy, with his pink polo shirt and his constant allusions to Wharton. If he’d been white, Grace was sure Miriam would have hated him. Instead, she introduced him to her parents after their third date. She didn’t prepare them—Grace suspected, in fact, that their mother expected a Japanese man, which would’ve been trouble enough—and Yvonne acquitted herself horribly. The language barrier should’ve worked to her advantage, but she managed to ask how many parents he had, and poor English didn’t excuse the look of open distaste on her face. The only redeeming quality of that excruciating dinner was its unexpected brevity. It was the only time Grace saw the guy and the last time Miriam saw her parents.
But as bad as that was, it didn’t really account for this lasting breach. Kenechi was just some dude Miriam dated for a month. She ended up ghosting him when she noticed he followed dozens of twenty-year-old Asian girls on Instagram. She met Blake online a few weeks later and never mentioned Kenechi unless Grace brought him up. Whenever Grace pestered her about him—which she did, often at first, trying to understand what had happened—Miriam got annoyed and changed the subject.
No, there was something else there, something bigger, she was sure of it. She could feel it like a glass wall, real and dangerous, but only made visible in certain lights—by dirt or fingerprints, or the glint of things reflected. Alfonso Curiel flashed against it, throwing its contours into relief, and she wanted to reach out and touch it. To confirm it was there and feel its resistance. To learn its shape and size, so she might find a way to remove it without shatter.
“What an awful story,” she said.
Yvonne reached for Paul’s dirty dishes and stacked them with her own. She stood up and started clearing the table.
“I mean it’s crazy they’re not even indicting him,” Grace pressed on, watching her mother. “You saw that, didn’t you? He just shot him in cold blood.”
They didn’t answer, and Grace wondered if the three of them were even equipped to have this conversation. She and her parents spoke to each other in a hybrid of English and Korean, slipping back and forth between languages, sometimes several times in a single sentence, but none of them was perfectly bilingual. Korean was Grace’s first language, but it faded fast once she went to school; she could still speak with a child’s vocabulary, plus pharmacy Korean, but her tongue tripped on anything complicated. Paul and Yvonne knew some basic English, enough to deal with their non-Korean customers, but despite living in California for thirty years, they’d never learned to speak it fluently. Most of the time, Grace and her parents understood each other. They had enough words to communicate what was important, Grace thought—needs, fears, comfort, love. But she didn’t know how to say “indict” in Korean, which meant her parents were unlikely to understand when she dropped the word in English.
Miriam said she and Grace had grow
n up sheltered and incurious because their parents only ever talked to them about their tiny universe—school and church, family and friends. She said it was a choice, that Paul and Yvonne had decided to box them in like hothouse orchids, so they’d need and obey them without thought. It was another of her unfair pronouncements, an attempt to spin Yvonne’s dedicated parenting as selfish cunning, to justify Miriam’s perpetual ingratitude.
She was about to drop the subject when Paul shook his head. “You don’t know the whole story.”
“No,” she admitted. “But I know he was an unarmed kid and that he’s dead now.”
“People make mistakes. The police didn’t know he was unarmed, and he was running from them.” He picked his teeth with a jagged fingernail.
“You can’t actually be saying it was his fault.”
“Grace,” he said sternly, and she realized she’d raised her voice. He cast his eyes toward Yvonne, who was at the kitchen counter, cutting a melon, pretending not to listen. “Geuman dwo.”
Geuman dwo. Stop it. Drop it. That’s enough. It was how her parents rebuked her when she was a child, a sharp command that pressed their authority, leaving no room for questions. Now it just pissed her off.
She spoke loud enough for Yvonne to hear. “It’s been two years,” she said, the exasperation of months of careful silence coming out in her voice. “Why won’t anyone tell me what happened?”
Yvonne came back to the table with a bowl of honeydew, sliced into pale green wedges. There were tears in her eyes—she was quivering from the effort of holding them in, and still they spilled over, falling down her drawn yellow face. She set the plastic tray down one corner at a time, as if afraid to make a sound.
“I’m sorry, Umma,” said Grace. Her anger was gone, replaced by a worse feeling, a tangle of frustration and dread and guilt. Yvonne sat down and dabbed at her eyes.
What was on TV, in her news feed, out in the world, happening to strangers in strange places—it mattered, certainly, but it wasn’t part of her life. She couldn’t let all that sour her on what she knew to be true, the fundamental goodness and value of the people she loved. If she did that, she was no better than Miriam.
Yvonne scooped one last tear, like a seed pearl, with the nail of her ring finger. She rubbed her nose with a small settling sigh, then stabbed a piece of melon with a tiny fork. She held it out to Grace, one hand cupped under the fruit to catch the drops of juice. “Try this,” she said, putting on a fragile smile.
Grace felt the usual resistance—it embarrassed her, even at home, when Yvonne tried to feed her like a child. But maybe it was best, for tonight, to accept her mother’s mothering. She opened her mouth and received the sweet bite.
Four
Sunday, August 11, 2019
The light turned red and Shawn rubbed at a sore spot under his right shoulder blade, testing the muscle for any unusual pain. The sun was setting on a long Sunday, no day of rest for a mover.
He wondered what Ray was doing, if he had any regrets about quitting so fast. He’d lasted all of three weeks with Manny, two of those weeks straight sandbagging, before the drive and the labor burned him out. It was too much too soon, and besides, he said, he had to go to church on Sundays. Duncan hired him part time at his bar, to give him something to do and keep his parole officer out of his ass, but it made Shawn nervous, not being able to keep an eye on him. That Ray might slip up, get bounced right back to prison.
Shawn knew the job was hard. It was exhausting—the heavy schedule, the heavy lifting. He’d been in good shape when he started—there wasn’t much to do besides read and work out in the pen—but moving was a challenge, demanding things of his body that had never been needed before. It had taken a while to learn the technique. How to pivot backward through stairwells, how to lift loaded boxes and couches without straining his back.
He was forty-one now, not young anymore, but he was built solid enough and knew his way around a move. He figured he could do this at least ten more years if he wanted. Manny had been a mover until he was almost fifty, only quitting to start his own business.
But there were some parts of the job that never got easier. The suspicious looks, the bad tips. Most people assumed he was stupid, that his life was little and wasted, plainly inferior to theirs. There was one customer early on—a black doctor with a thin white wife, moving into a mansion with marble columns in Studio City—who clapped him on the back and asked if he didn’t wish he’d gone to college. Shawn almost quit on the spot.
Still, most days, he was glad he stuck it out. He liked the money, for one, the slow but steady flow of income it provided, clean money to add to Jazz’s salary and keep him out of trouble. The labor kept him physically fit. Mentally, it wasn’t extraordinarily stimulating, but there was always some problem solving, and he was picking up Spanish, since some of the people he worked with didn’t speak much English.
And he was grateful, if not without ambivalence, for his continued connection to Los Angeles, the place he was born and raised and had never meant to leave. Despite all the shit, the baggage and tragedy, he had memories here, and they weren’t all bitter.
Six, sometimes seven days a week, he ran across the city, skimming its streets in a moving truck. Some days he saw more of Los Angeles than he had in his entire childhood. This morning, his team moved a white couple from Echo Park to Sherman Oaks; in the afternoon, they moved a Mexican family from Boyle Heights to Compton, taking him within five miles of his old place, his nostalgia faint enough to enjoy without pain.
It was past five o’clock by the time he got back to Manny’s office in Northridge, and he was looking forward to going home. He just had to get to Mid-City to pick up Darryl, Dasha, and Aunt Sheila first. They’d ridden down with him yesterday morning to spend the weekend in L.A., staying with Uncle Richard’s sister, Aunt Reggie, and Claudette, her roommate and—they all knew, though they’d never been told—longtime girlfriend, who’d moved in shortly after Aunt Reggie and Uncle Eli’s divorce. Now that Jason and Crystal were grown, she liked having the kids over, playing the part of the cool young grandma in the big city. Shawn shuttled them back and forth at least once a month during the summer. Every now and then, they’d get together with Jason and Crystal, who lived in Fontana and San Bernardino.
He called Aunt Sheila from the freeway.
“I was just about to call you,” she said.
“I’m on my way, Auntie.”
“Change of plans. Jules is taking us to dinner.”
Shawn kept his sigh as silent as he could manage. Aunt Sheila hadn’t mentioned seeing Jules Searcey, and he suspected she’d planned to meet him well in advance.
“It’s Sunday,” he said. “Don’t we need to get home?”
“I already said we’d go, Shawn. Besides, it’s what the kids want to do. They don’t want to leave L.A. yet. We’ll have our Sunday dinner here. Ray and Nisha’ll be glad to have more time alone.”
Sunday dinner was one of the cornerstones of their family life. It was practically sacred—had been so through all their shifts, their contractions and expansions; was probably precious because of them. Most weeks, they met at the Holloway house, where they’d cook or, on busy weekends like this one, pick up takeout. The important thing was that they were all together, or so said Aunt Sheila. If anyone else tried to change plans last minute, they’d be in for a sermon.
“Well, did you tell Jazz?” he asked.
“You know I did. She’s gonna put Momo to bed early and watch Netflix. Sounded excited about it, too. I was almost offended.”
“Alright, then. Go ahead. I’ll pick you up later.”
“What’re you talking about? You’re coming.”
“Are Aunt Reggie and Claudette going?” He had a feeling they weren’t—Searcey didn’t know them, and Aunt Sheila wouldn’t invite them along on his dollar. “I should catch up with them.”
“Reggie’s got an Al-Anon meeting.” She paused. “She’s not an alcoholic. I guess Crystal is,
though.” Her voice was lowered, trying to reel him in with some weak-ass family gossip everyone already knew.
“I don’t know. I think I’ll just hang for a bit, drive around or something.”
“All you do is drive around. Come on, join us. The kids’ll want you there.”
He shook his head, knowing he didn’t have a good excuse. “Alright. I’ll pick y’all up in half an hour.”
“Don’t worry yourself. Jules is coming to get us in a minute. We’re going to Roscoe’s.”
Of course Searcey was treating them to fried chicken. “The one on Pico?”
“Yeah, near Reggie’s. We’ll get in line. You get there when you get there.”
They were all waiting for him when he walked in, seated at a booth surrounded by pink neon lights. Aunt Sheila waved him over, and Searcey stood to greet him, his knee popping as he rose, his long body extending like a ladder.
There was a time when Shawn stood in awe of Jules Searcey, when Shawn was a skittish teenage boy, and Searcey this tall white newspaperman who had Aunt Sheila in his thrall. Looking at him now, Shawn felt his own age. Searcey was well kept, his eyes still hawkishly bright behind his glasses, but he was starting toward bony where he had been lean, and his long, boyish flop of hair, once reddish brown, had turned a steel wool gray. It seemed incredible that he’d been in Shawn’s life for so many years, when Shawn had done nothing to maintain their acquaintance. But he was stuck with him, loosely, at least, for as long as Aunt Sheila lived. She and Searcey would never let each other go.
He shook Shawn’s hand and smiled. “For the record, Dasha’s the one who picked Roscoe’s,” he said.
“I found it on Yelp,” she said proudly, making room for her uncle. “Grandma says you used to come here.”
“We’ve been coming here since your daddy and uncle were children, when there were no lines and no white people.” She touched Searcey’s shirtsleeve. “No offense, Jules.”