by Steph Cha
Jung-Ja Han dropped out of sight, behind the counter—was she ducking or did she faint?—and Ava Matthews turned around, ready to flee the scene.
Then Jung-Ja Han came back up, her black hair reappearing above the counter, and Ava Matthews dropped, disappearing behind the store’s aisles. Grace had to watch again to catch the quick movement of Jung-Ja Han’s hand, the glint of an object, otherwise invisible.
This much was undeniable: Jung-Ja Han shot Ava Matthews from behind.
Grace eyed the view count—64,771 since the video was posted on YouTube in 2015, by a user named lee woohyuk with the message, “I want to give my deepest condolences.” The number made her heart jump. Tens of thousands of people had sought out this footage in less than five years? How many had seen it when it was playing on every news channel? Millions? Tens of millions? More?
She put her phone down, stood up, walked around, swinging her arms like she was warming up for a wrestling match. It didn’t help. She stopped pacing and lay down on the couch, held a hand to her throat, willing her pulse to calm down. She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing. There wasn’t enough air in the room.
Less than a minute later, she was back on her phone—she’d started this, and now she couldn’t stop. She scrolled down to see the comments; she had a sudden, rapacious need to read them all.
There were so many vacuous comments, poorly spelled and worded exclamations of sympathy, anger, and virulent racism. “korean bitch just wanted to kill a black teennager!!!!!!” “Ghetto tripe got what she desreved. good!” It didn’t seem right that so many people chose this particular comment section for their fly-by N-bomb drop missions, but the attacks on Koreans hit her much harder. After all, people sided with this girl just because she was black, then turned around and said Koreans were racist.
A commenter with an American flag avatar pointed out, in several threads, that Ava Matthews’s assault of Jung-Ja Han was “viscous and terrifying” and that the “Hard Truth” was that the shooting was therefore justified. Grace found herself huddling toward these posts—though she wished he could spell vicious—like they were the only candles in a dark, cold room. She clicked on his profile, curious about this voice of reason, and to her chagrin found that he commented on dozens of videos relating to black shooting victims, criticizing every one of them, even ones much more blameless than Ava Matthews. He had a blog about something called “racial realism,” and Grace decided not to look that up, unsure she wanted to know anything more about Jung-Ja Han’s great defender.
Jung-Ja Han—that was the name of the woman in this video, the woman who shot an unarmed teenager in the back of the head. It wasn’t a name she’d heard before, so how could it belong to her mother? And the video—what, was she really supposed to turn on the woman who raised her because of that? Her mother didn’t appear in that video. There was almost nothing to see; that blurry figure could have been anyone.
Except that it was her and only her. The girl’s killer and Grace’s mom.
The garage door rumbled open, startling Grace awake. She’d fallen asleep after all, her face in her folded arms on the tabletop, her phone, low on battery, clutched in one hand. For a second, she perked up, a Pavlovian response wired into her since childhood. The sound of the garage that meant Umma or Appa was home.
She checked the time—almost eight in the morning. Paul had spent the night at the hospital.
She heard him shove through the door to the house and take off his shoes.
“Appa?” she called.
He didn’t hear her, or ignored her, and before she could gather the strength to get up and intercept him, he’d disappeared into his room.
There was so much she needed to ask Paul. She was almost to his door when she heard the shower running. She barged into the bedroom and stopped just short of barging into the bathroom. How could he shower before checking in with his daughters?
“Appa!” she shouted, knocking aggressively. “What’s happening? Is Umma okay?”
Paul’s voice came through the door, but his words were lost in the water.
“What?” Grace called back.
There was no answer, and she went back to the kitchen, fuming. When he came out of his room, dressed in clean clothes, making what looked like a beeline for the garage, Grace was ready to tackle him.
“Dad, wait,” she said.
Paul looked at her, doing nothing to hide the exasperation on his face. “I have to get back to Mom. You come with Miriam when she wakes up.”
“How is Mom? I haven’t heard anything since you sent me home.”
“They finished the surgery. She’s still not awake. They say she hasn’t gotten any worse.”
“That’s good news?”
“It’s not news.” He shrugged and turned away again.
“Dad.”
“What is it?”
She looked at her father, her only parent in this crisis, treating her as an annoying distraction from the task at hand. “Miriam told me,” she said, and started to cry.
His jaw tensed, his Adam’s apple clutched high in his throat. “Told you what?”
“She told me.”
She was full-on crying now, falling apart in a way she never allowed herself in front of her father. There was relief in the abandon, the burden thrown from her body for Paul to dive down and catch. He needed to help her this time. There was no one else.
“She shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
The cold anger in his voice cut off her sobs like a slap.
“She had to. You should have told me ages ago, instead of leaving me to think everything was fine and normal until—”
“Enough,” he said, raising his voice. “I’m going back to the hospital. This is not the time.”
“When is the time? Mom could be dying. There might not be another time.”
“Don’t even think about bringing this to Mom. The last thing she needs to do is worry about answering to you.”
“But—”
“I said that’s enough, Grace. You don’t know anything. Neither of you girls do.”
“Just help me, Dad. Please. I want to understand.”
She waited for an explanation: the special circumstances, the debilitating fear. A plea for love and forgiveness. She felt a sudden wild tenderness for him, picturing him tapping his foot outside a courtroom, in line at the DMV, stumbling through clerical conversations in his rickety English, so he could change the family name. Grace was the only one who was born a Park—Miriam had been Miriam Han until she was four years old, not that she’d remembered. Grace was ready to be let in.
He sighed, his temper subsiding as he looked at her. “I know you do,” he said gently. “But you can never understand.”
Eight
Saturday, August 24, 2019
His phone alarm went off at six and Shawn thought about calling in sick for the first time in years. He’d stayed up drinking with Ray until just over three hours earlier, when Ray had nodded off in the middle of his fifteenth toast to Ava and Jung-Ja Han’s shooter. Instead of knocking Shawn out, the alcohol seemed to swarm in his veins and keep his body buzzing. He must have fallen asleep somewhere along the way, but he only knew it by the pain of waking up. He shouldn’t have given in to Ray’s goading. Ray could afford to indulge his sentimentality; he had nowhere to be in the morning.
Shawn turned his alarm off and rolled back deep into his bed, grabbing for another quarter hour of sleep. After a minute he gave up—his mind was too active, too glutted with old memories. When he opened his eyes, they were sore and parched but fully alert.
He checked his email, out of habit, and saw that his inbox was jammed with notes and inquiries from friends and strangers. The word had spread overnight. When he searched the internet for Jung-Ja Han, he found her name mentioned several times on Twitter but in no news stories since yesterday. One of the tweets linked to an L.A. Times story, posted late last night. It was light on details, but it reported an early-evening
shooting outside the Hanin Market in Northridge, the victim in critical condition.
He put his phone away, got ready for work, and kissed Jazz and Monique goodbye. It was only as he entered Northridge, in his Manny’s Movers T-shirt and basketball shorts, that he knew he’d been fooling himself about going in today.
The Hanin Market was only a mile and a half from Manny’s. He knew she wouldn’t be there and that the store would be closed—even without the shooting, it was still just after seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. But he had to see it for himself, the place where Jung-Ja Han had hidden in the open all these years.
He called Manny and left a message, said he had a family emergency and had to miss work today. Manny would cut him the slack. Shawn never pulled any bullshit, and his boss knew it. Even today, he would’ve gone in if he couldn’t be spared, but Shawn had been heading a three-man team since Ray quit, and he trusted Ulises and Marco could handle a move on their own.
The streets were wide and empty this early, and Shawn decelerated as he came up on a stretch of strip malls studded with signs written in Korean script. He recognized the foreign alphabet, less crowded than Chinese, softer and loopier than Japanese, with those dangling Os. It had been a while since he’d seen it. There wasn’t much need for it in Palmdale, where the only Koreans he even knew about ran the all-you-can-eat sushi joint—there weren’t many Japanese people either. He’d probably driven through this area before but hadn’t had reason to stop. He hadn’t realized there was this suburban Koreatown just a five-minute drive from Manny’s office.
He turned into an enormous strip mall, the vast lot mostly empty, the businesses closed. The Hanin Market sat at the center of a long row of storefronts, all facing out from the same sand-colored box of a building. It was a huge complex with a tired suburban feel, the businesses listed on a large grimy directory, its dull lettering visible from Shawn’s car. A Starbucks, a Realtor, a Honeybaked Ham. A Korean school and several after-school programs—music and art and SAT prep. A small town’s worth of services, all of it seeming to flow from the market. A food court and a nail salon, an optometrist and a dentist. A drugstore called Woori Pharmacy.
He parked the car and hesitated before turning off the engine and stepping out. Was this really it? There were no cops, no cameras, no crime scene tape. A few cars in the lot, people early to work, he assumed, none of them out here gawking. This didn’t feel like a place where something big had just happened. Maybe twelve hours was all it took to clean up and start forgetting. Yet he felt a nagging need to be furtive, like he was returning to the scene of his own crime. He looked around—nothing alarming, but maybe this was a bad idea. What was he getting out of it, after all?
He walked to the entrance to the marketplace, a set of automatic glass sliding doors, locked firmly against him. It was a nice morning, the sky cheerful and open and gentle; a smiling kind of day. Day like today, he and Jazz might get out the lawn chairs and sit out front, watch Monique run around on the driveway. Day like today was made for restless children. He saw himself running up and down the sidewalk in front of his old house, chasing after Ray and Ava as they kicked a rubber handball down the street, shouting, “Marco! Polo!” What had they been doing? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t thought of that day in years.
Woori Pharmacy was in the entryway arcade leading into the market, a glass box of a store, small, from what he could see, squished between a bakery and a cosmetics shop. It was undisturbed—the shooting had happened outside, not in her store this time. The closed market was too dark to let him see deep into the drugstore, but he could picture her sitting behind the counter, safe and hidden for years, until someone brought her into the light.
A car entered the lot, and Shawn stepped away from the doorway. The driver was a middle-aged Korean woman with a wide-brimmed hat perched on a head of short permed hair. She parked two aisles from Shawn’s car and got out carrying a monogrammed purse close to her body. Shawn walked back toward his car, feeling conspicuous, with his brown skin and his tattoos, the confusion of emotion that must have rolled off of him, perfuming his sweat. She didn’t meet his eye or even look in his direction. But she went in a long arc around him to get to the market’s doors.
Jung-Ja Han had probably left work through those doors. Walked to her car the way Shawn was walking. Had she seen her attacker coming? Or had he come at her from behind, aiming for the back of her head?
His breath caught—he made a sound like a moan, a wordless prayer. There, on the asphalt, Shawn saw a washed-out blot showing dark red in the sun. Jung-Ja Han’s lifeblood, spilled and scrubbed, but not scrubbed away. Proof that some justice, however messy, had found her at last.
Ava was buried in the Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs, though where exactly, no one was sure anymore. Four years after her funeral, the cemetery closed shop when its owners got caught reselling burial plots, stacking multiple bodies into single graves, most of the dead poor and black, with poor black families who were easy to ignore. They dug up corpses and coffins, dumped them in piles of dirt and remains to get scattered again, sharing the ground with the bones of strangers. Ava didn’t have a gravestone anymore—where her grave used to be, there was a gravestone for someone named Cornelius Henderson, a World War II vet, dead since 1959. The bodies had been piled and shuffled, and there was no way to know if Ava was anywhere near where they laid her down.
It had been years since Shawn last came here. Aunt Sheila hated the place. When she found out what happened, she lost sleep for weeks, this last insult bringing back all the ones that had come before. There were memorials for Ava over the years, plenty of them, but none of them took place at the cemetery. They were always at church or, on the bigger anniversaries, when Aunt Sheila could get a crowd together, at the intersection of Ninety-First and Figueroa, outside the Numero Uno Market, built over the remains of the place where Ava died.
It had taken him more than an hour to make the drive from Northridge, stopping at a plant shop along the way. The park was quiet and neglected; the grass was brown and the weeds were tall. It pained him that this was where his sister was buried, that she couldn’t have a neat grave, her name on a little stone on a watered lawn. That seemed like so little to ask, yet even that was denied her, stolen from her.
What she had instead was a share in a mass burial site, marked by a big granite tombstone engraved with the words:
WHOMEVERFOREVER
WHEREVER
REST IN PEACE
This stone, at least, was in better shape than most of the others. It looked like it got cleaned once in a while, despite the mildew and bird shit; there were even a few remembrances at its base: an American flag, a cluster of plastic roses. Shawn leaned a tiny potted succulent against the stone and closed his eyes.
When he was little—between one and three years old, they never did quite nail it down—Ava made him high-five a cactus. She set it up with a series of high fives that had him chasing her hand like a cat chases a light. Up high, down low, too slow! For her finale, she extended her hand, palm out flat, over a potted cactus, and when he slammed down as fast and eager as he could, she whisked her hand away. Ava laughed until he started bawling; then she cried and confessed to their mother, who spanked her for the prank. This was his first memory, the spike of the cactus the jolt that brought him online.
He remembered the way he abhorred and adored her, the vicious way they fought, holding nothing back, trying every time to break each other’s hearts, then making up without effort, the wounds they gave each other easily forgotten. She used to sucker him out of the best trading cards, the best Halloween candy; once, he called her an asshole, and she used that to blackmail him into servitude for what felt like several years. Yet he worshipped her. The first time she went on a sleepover, he sat in front of her picture and cried.
When she was murdered, their relationship was already changing, morphing into something less volatile, more affectionate, a preview of the stable, nurturing companio
nship they would provide each other into adulthood. And sometimes he missed this as much as he missed her, the broken promise of a lifelong friendship with the person who knew him better than anyone. This is what Jung-Ja Han took away from him: an ordinary girl who meant the world to him.
Ava was not a genius. She did well in school, but whether she would’ve graduated, let alone gone to college, there was no way to know. Shawn was smart, too, and he hadn’t done either. She was a talented piano player, but there was a limit to her talents. It was plentifully apparent even in her brief career. She didn’t have the resources to compete with the kids who practiced for hours each day, the ones who’d been playing since they were five, with professional teachers, with parents to prod them and pay for their lessons.
She was not a saint or an angel. Bad things had happened to her, and they didn’t make her good; good things, too, and she took some of them for granted. She swore and talked back. Fought back, too. And Shawn knew it was gospel that she never stole, but she stole. He’d seen it firsthand, one night in Westwood, when a riot broke out under their feet.
She took a cassette tape—a gift for him—and a pair of jeans from a Guess store, a pair she’d coveted that Aunt Sheila wouldn’t buy for her because they were tight and low-slung and expensive. It was nothing, in the scheme of things. That same night, Ray got a new pair of sneakers; Duncan got a leather jacket, a boom box, even a cell phone—the first Shawn had ever seen, a black plastic thing the size of his forearm. But it was more than a quart of milk. It was a violation to the tune of something like seventy dollars. It was, in the end, much more than some people thought her life was worth.
Shawn didn’t know if Aunt Sheila remembered what Ava was actually like. She gave her aunt hell in her teen years. They fought constantly; Aunt Sheila had strict standards for her one baby girl, and Ava was always falling short of them.
One time, when he was in his twenties, running with the Baring Cross Crips, he told Aunt Sheila it was possible that Ava meant to steal that milk from Jung-Ja Han, that it wasn’t out of character, and that she was plenty pissed enough to do it. He was tired of pretending Ava was a perfect child; he hated that perfection was what the world required to mourn her.