by Y. Euny Hong
My father rented so many movies, in fact, that he seemed to have come to an arrangement with the video store. He compulsively refused to return videos. Having no other choice, therefore, the video store got into the habit of coming around to our house to collect their videos — not their normal practice by any means, but it was either that or never see their tapes again. Somehow my father managed to trick them into bringing him a new crop of videos on each of these visits, so that what had begun as a way of dealing with delinquency had now become my father’s exclusive video delivery service. He got on the phone and they came in a matter of minutes; I saw them do it. And they didn’t even charge him late fees; perhaps because he was quite possibly their best customer.
I admit it: I was impressed. Even in this tiny way, he was making the mountain come to Mohammed. It was exactly what I had been taught to do, only he did it with so much more finesse.
I grew up with the firm impression that my parents had an unparalleled and intimidating classical-music library, but now I noticed that it included the soundtrack to the movie Titanic and at least three previous losers of the Eurovision Song Contest.
And my father seemed to have acquired a large collection of joke books from around the world, with such titles as The Big Book of New Zealand Jokes. His explanation was that he needed material for speech making. But when I flipped through the books, I saw that he had dog-eared only the smutty jokes.
We watched television the whole goddamn day, with only the most cursory of conversations passing between us. My father nodded off to sleep for a few minutes, eventually rousing during an advert for underarm deodorant.
“Oh, sorry; did I drift off?” he slurred contentedly, his eyelids still heavy. “Television is like a lullaby, have you noticed?”
My mother then said, “I forgot something! I have something for you, Judith.” She leaped from her rocking chair and walked into her room, gesturing for me to follow her. She opened her closet and started to open and close different boxes. A present? What manner of present?
“I’ve been saving these for you since menopause,” she said, showing me a large box containing hundreds of unopened maxipads. “I don’t need these anymore. Why don’t you take them?”
Some of the pads were as big as diapers.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the maxipads from her.
I HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT that my parents couldn’t stand the sight of each other, that they were staying together only to avoid the social stigma of divorce. I saw now that, though they were constantly making cutting remarks at each other, they had a sense of togetherness that was enviable, a kind of bond that is lacking in modern couples. In the West, there is a popular belief that an ideal couple is one who, even if they were not shagging, would have been friends anyway. My parents, meanwhile, share no hobbies in common, and each still thinks that the other is some bizarre creature, and yet for this very reason they have retained a sense of wonderment about the opposite sex.
My mother, in particular, seemed a great deal calmer than she was when I was little. The volume of her speaking voice had reduced by at least ten decibels. Let us not mince words: she had greatly improved without me around.
THREE DAYS after my visit to Min-Joon, I was awakened by the sound of my mother shuffling into my room. She was holding a cordless phone, which she wordlessly placed next to me on the pillow.
“What did I do?” I asked groggily.
“Jung is on the phone for you,” she said, leaving my room and returning to the blaring television in the sitting room.
I walked over to the door and shut it, then returned to bed with the phone resting near my ear. “What is it, Jung?” I asked uncomfortably. We had not spoken since the day I learned of her deep and abiding admiration for pharaonic matrimonial traditions.
“So how is everything over there?” she asked with a tone of everydayness that irked me.
“Oh, it’s fabulous,” I said. “Why am I here by myself, Jung? When are you guys going to show up? It’s not fair.”
“ ‘Not fair’? That’s not really very tactful, is it? As it happens, we are unavoidably detained.”
“You can’t use your illegitimacy as an excuse to pick and choose your responsibilities to my family.” It was the first time in my life I had ever berated her.
“Key and I weren’t raised in the same house, Judith. You do realize that.” I was taken aback by the abrupt segue and briefly held the phone away from my ear at the mention of Key’s name. Jung continued, “We weren’t really very familial toward each other. Not like brother and sister. And he protected me from our family. For two very messed-up people, that kind of feeling of mutual salvation was very easily conflated with amorous feelings. It’s really much more common than you might think. When I was at school in Lausanne, lots of the girls slept with their brothers, although admittedly it was usually stepbrothers and half-brothers.”
“I don’t need to hear this,” I said.
Jung’s slickness disappeared. She screamed, “LISTEN! JUDE, LISTEN!!”
I had never heard her raise her voice like that. I fell silent.
Catching her breath, she continued, “Neither Key nor I ever felt comfortable without the other. We would try to date other people, but we would always come back to each other. Until I met Emerson. At which point, I tried to extricate myself from Key, and you saw how furious he was. He’s not taking it well at all. I haven’t seen him in a few weeks, and that’s the longest we’ve been out of touch since moving to New York.”
“How long has this been going on?” I asked numbly. “Since you were kids?”
Jung mumbled.
“You’re going to have to speak up,” I said crossly.
“Since we were fourteen. He came to visit me at Lausanne, having snuck away from a school skiing trip. We hadn’t seen each other in such a long time. All of my friends were fawning over him and saying how charming he was, and I was so jealous. That’s when it started.”
“You’re repulsive.”
“I wouldn’t expect an outsider to understand.”
“An outsider?” I was incredulous. “Blood purity must be some sort of cult for you, if you and your brother think of your own niece as an outsider.”
“Jude, you sleep with men for money.”
“So it’s better to sleep with your brother for free?”
“I don’t disparage the things you do; as you recall, it was my idea to set you up with that life. I ask only that you extend me the same courtesy. Both our acts are victimless.”
“You can’t exculpate yourself from blame by making a moral equivalency argument,” I said officiously.
“What a crashing bore you are, Jude. You should like Joshua now,” she said.
“I consider that a great compliment,” I said, hanging up the phone.
I called her right back. “Since you brought it up, have you — have you heard from Joshua?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I imagine you’re dead to him now.” She hung up.
I rummaged through my parents’ liquor cabinet; all they had was some open, suspiciously frothy Chivas Regal. Forget it, then; I would have to go to bed with all my wits about me. How peculiar it felt.
27
Round-Eyed Girl
I HAD NOT FORGOTTEN Min-Joon’s words about the family secret. I asked my father whether he had ever been to the family archives.
“No,” he replied. “Why?”
“I thought I’d have a look.”
“I don’t think you should bother,” my father said opaquely. “Your name isn’t in it, you know. Girls’ names are not recorded. Besides which, our immediate family line ends with me and my brother.”
“Just the same, do you know how to get there?”
“No idea.”
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to press my dying cousin. I spent the morning calling around different civic-records offices until I found someone who was able to give me a street address for the archives.
I napped, res
olving to steal away the next morning to visit the archives. But I was sidetracked by a surprise from my mother.
She awoke me the following morning; not once since arriving had I been allowed to sleep past seven A.M. She said, “I have another present for you. We’re going to a medical clinic.”
“My present is an early flu shot?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” she said.
I have said that my family is contemptuous of the medical profession, but doctors have rather grown on me. They can help you change your life.
For the third time in under a year, I was to undergo a completely elective surgical procedure with the promise that it would better my life — in May of last year to tie my tubes, then in May of this year to untie them, and now this.
My mother and I took a cab to a medical clinic in the ritzy Apkujung neighborhood of Seoul. The waiting area had white leather sofas and white coffee tables, and ficus trees planted in white pots. The smell of green tea wafted through the air, but not real green tea; rather, the scented-candle kind of green tea that you can buy at the L’Occitane store.
The receptionist handed me a medical questionnaire. I laughed when I saw that many of the questions were identical to those I had been asked before getting my tubes tied. My mother saw what I was writing, then clamped her hand on the clipboard, removed the page, and crumpled it into a ball. “Start over with a new sheet,” she said. “There’s no reason to write down all those antidepressants you’re taking.”
“But don’t they need to know?” I asked. “What if there’s some kind of interaction with the anesthesia?”
“I have friends who come to this clinic,” she said. “What if the doctor tells them you’re on antidepressants? Then what? What will I tell them?”
“Why would he tell your friends? Isn’t there a doctor-patient confidentiality code?”
“I don’t think they really observe that. You know how it is here. The doctor went to the same university as your father; that means we’re all in the same circle.”
“Same department? Same year? Same golf course?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” my mother said. “In Korea you find out things about people even if you don’t really want to know. That’s just how it is. Sometimes you act as if you never lived here.”
“So what if your friends find out? If they make fun of you for having a daughter on antidepressants, you can make fun of them for injecting their nerves with the contents of a dented soup can.”
“That’s not how Botox is done. Please just start over and leave out the antidepressants. If there’s any drug interaction, I will take full responsibility.”
My mother and I were led into the office of a short, baby-faced man in his forties, bearing a supercilious expression. This was Dr. Kim. He had that stiff, coarse Korean hair that, when untamed, looks like a pompadour.
“Why are you smiling?” he asked sternly. He continued, “Turn to face me.” He picked up a metal instrument that looked like a very thin letter opener and pressed it into my eyelid, saying, “This is where we would make the stitches.”
“Will there be knives?” I asked timorously.
He addressed my mother instead of me. “No, fortunately, your daughter doesn’t have fatty eyelids, so it won’t be necessary to make incisions or suck out the fat. We can do this with a few stitches to each eye, so the healing process won’t take more than a week.”
I was at the clinic to undergo double-eyelid surgery, by which an Asian eyelid is made to look Caucasian by means of either an incision to the eyelids, stitching, or both. It is by far the most popular cosmetic surgical procedure in Korea.
One by one I saw friends and acquaintances succumbing to this surgery. John Park, a Korean-American guy I knew at Yale, flew to Seoul over spring break our sophomore year just to have his eyes done. Upon his return to school, he wore shades for a week while the wounds healed. When he stopped wearing them, he made up a spectacular lie to explain the transformation in his appearance: he claimed that he had had a cyst removed from one eyelid, requiring a fold to conceal the scar. Then, the doctor allegedly told John that he might as well get the other eye done, too, for symmetry’s sake.
Had John lived in Korea, the cover story would have been unnecessary. When it comes to this procedure, no one asks and no one tells. Someone might have flat eyelids one day and folded eyelids the next, and it’s just understood you don’t say anything. Here in Apkujung, it is not uncommon to find thirty plastic surgeons in a single city block.
How easy this all was. They led me to the surgery room on the spot, dressed me in a paper gown, and put me on a slab.
I gasped loudly as I saw an enormous needle approaching my eyelid. Dr. Kim flipped my eyelids inside out and injected anesthesia into the pink underside of each eye. I felt a warm liquid dripping down my eyes: anesthesia, tears, and blood.
“You absolutely must stop weeping,” said Dr. Kim.
“Stop,” I said.
“You won’t feel anything in a few minutes,” he said.
“I said STOP!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, that seismic scream that always made those around me tremble from head to toe. The doctor and his two assistants looked at me, stunned.
I sat up abruptly, pulling off my paper hospital gown, which was drenched with blood spots that were already turning brown. “Where are my clothes?” I said, reducing my volume only very slightly. “My clothes!” I repeated. One of the nurses pointed at the curtained booth where I had changed. Another nurse scrambled to pick up the medical instruments I had knocked over.
My mother burst into the doorway just in time to see me tearing across the room wearing only my underwear.
“What is going on here?” she screamed.
“Maybe you’d better reflect on this a bit more,” said the doctor, peeling off his gloves.
“I think we’d better,” my mother said. “I’m terribly sorry, Doctor. Please do forgive me.”
The doctor’s face bore a “Fine, more golf for me” expression.
I grabbed my clothes from the changing room and hastily put them on. My mother squared away the payment for the surgery, signed some papers, and got some ice bags for my eyes.
The cab ride home was silent at first; I lay with my head back, holding the ice bag over my eyes. Finally, she said, “You were perfectly happy going along with this idea until you felt pain. Why do you always quit things at the first sign of discomfort? Beauty is pain.”
I was angry that she had turned this into a question of my mettle.
“Everyone else has to be treated with the greatest of diplomacy and restraint; you were begging the doctor’s forgiveness for embarrassing him, but when it comes to your own daughter, you have no problem telling me outright how unattractive you think I am. Not just telling me, but making me get cut up for it.”
“This wasn’t my idea. It was yours. You’ve been begging for us to let you get eyelid surgery since you were a teenager. We didn’t want you to mutilate yourself, remember?”
“That never happened,” I said, though the waver in my voice signaled to me that I was wrong before I was fully conscious of it. “And even if it did, I don’t want this anymore. I’ve gotten into enough trouble trying to prove that I was pretty.”
There was a long pause. Then my mother said, “What makes you so certain that I think you’re unattractive?”
“For one thing, a lifetime of your being so obsessed with my weight that you rejoice at the prospect that I might have the runs or worms. For another — why have you been sending me all the photo albums containing my pictures? Except you can’t bear to look at them? What did the note say? Oh, yes, ‘I don’t want these here.’”
“You think you know everything, don’t you? So clever. But you’re wrong. During the Korean War, my family lost every photograph ever taken of us. I have told you this before. And recently, there have been some worrisome talks in this country about another war coming soon. If there is one, I don’t think I could recove
r from losing all my photos for the second time in my life. They’re the most important thing I own in the world.”
Now, why did she have to go and say a thing like that? My eyes, still concealed by the ice bag, stung with my tears.
“Would you like a piece of candy?” asked my mother.
“No. Thanks.”
She fished one out of her purse and unwrapped it for me. She put a plum sourball in my mouth and I felt her finger on my lip. Previously, the only time she had ever touched my face was to check my forehead temperature. Perhaps it is not surprising that I develop chronic low-grade fevers in times of excitement or stress.
Her purse contained panacea for anything that ailed.
We were two emotional retards in a cab, channeling our love through a sodding Hermès handbag.
28
Dormouse
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, my eyes looked like two plums, just from the trauma of getting locally anesthetized. I lay on my parents’ sofa for most of the day, keeping an ice bag over my eyes. My father made general grunts of disgust when he caught a glimpse of my purple distended eyelids, and locked himself in his study.
The following day, I resolved to visit the family archives. After an afternoon nap. I drifted off to sleep, then was awakened by my mother calling out my name.
“Huh? What?” I asked, absently rubbing my eyes. Then I remembered how much pain I was in, and howled.
“Don’t move,” she said. “Judith, do you suppose you could stay here another week or so?”
“I’d really rather not,” I said, thinking about Madame Tartakov.
“I mean, is your plane ticket open for the date of return?”
“I think so,” I said. Her voice sounded strange. I slid the lukewarm ice bag off my eyes.
She continued, “I ask because I think it might be a good idea for you to stay.”
“You said that already, Mother.”
“There is to be a…funeral.”
So Min-Joon had passed already. “Oh, shit,” I said. That’s what I said: Oh, shit. “I guess it’s a good thing I came when I did,” I added.