There were only a couple pictures of Jiyeon Kim on the internet, and they were small and indefinite. She looked like a Korean woman in her thirties, with dark eyes, a short nose, and shoulder length hair in a coarse cut. I tried to remember what my mother looked like at that age, but all I could summon up was my weak-eyed, stocky mother, lying like a beached fish in her hospital bed. I would have had to look much harder to make any definitive conclusions.
Then a theory took shape and snapped into place—of course, the shooter had heard the first whisper of these rumors, and had taken immediate action in the heat of his wrath. The very mention of Jiyeon Kim’s name had incited him to an attempt on an innocent woman’s life. Who could be so vengeful?
I started feeling like a detective as I searched for information on Darius Bronson’s older brother—the hooligan who’d put his disabled brother in harm’s way, who must have spent the last twenty years nursing outsized portions of implacable guilt, unexpended rage.
But my hunch, it turned out, was entirely wrong. Michael Bronson committed suicide two years after his brother’s death. He shot himself in the head. He was eighteen.
* * *
I went for a run and worked on a problem set until Sidney called, asking for me to take her home. Our father would spend the night at the hospital, and we would have our childhood home to ourselves.
I picked her up and kept the radio on to mask the silence of our drive home. I didn’t trust myself to have this emotionally taxing conversation while driving, and I couldn’t brook the idea of small talk when I was so full of panic that my skin almost quivered at its seams.
Sidney picked up on the tension in my body, on the silence of the ride, but she waited until we were parked in our parents’ garage before opening her mouth.
“What is it?”
“Is Jiwoo Park Mom’s real name?”
“Oh boy,” she said. “What a question.”
“Is it?”
“Come on. Let’s get inside the house at least.”
I sat at the kitchen table while Sidney rummaged through the cabinets.
“Where do they keep the liquor now? It’s not where it used to be.”
“To your left, that one,” I said. “But there isn’t much there.”
She opened the cabinet onto a half empty bottle of Crown Royal. “God, why does Dad have the worst taste?”
“There’s soju and beer in the fridge.”
“Do we have lemons?”
I shrugged.
She ran around the kitchen, assembling supplies with a serious sense of mission. A few minutes later, she sat down next to me and put a bottle of soju on the table, along with two wide shot glasses and a bumpy sallow lemon, cut into halves.
She poured out the soju and squeezed lemon into each shot, making the liquid turn cloudy. The juice ran down her palm and seeds dropped in and around the glasses.
“Okay, one shot,” she commanded, pronouncing the English phrase in the Korean way, an order to drain the glass.
We drank the soju. It tasted foul. I wasn’t much of a drinker—I liked a sweet white wine now and then, but I rarely ventured into anything that tasted like alcohol. Soju, for a drink with the alcohol content of wine, tasted a whole lot like cheap vodka. I made a face and Sidney laughed. She’d swallowed it like a gulp of water, and she was pouring out another.
“This’ll be quick then, I guess,” she said. “Come on, one more.”
We took three more shots in the next ten minutes, Sidney administering each dose like so much necessary medicine.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, when my body was visibly loosened.
“Drunk,” I said. “That’s how I’m supposed to feel, right?”
She nodded. “You had a question for me.”
I felt suddenly tired and melancholy, and my eyes grew hot with the prickle of incoming tears. “Did she kill that boy, unni?”
“Back up. What boy?” she asked, though I could feel that she knew exactly what boy.
“The retarded boy,” I said.
“That’s not the preferred term.”
“Whatever.”
She sighed and held out her palms, face up. “This is a red pill blue pill situation, Grace.”
“That only works if I have the option of forgetting any of this happened.”
“The human brain can do wonderful things,” she said.
I put my face in my hands. “Oh my God, it’s true.”
She nodded, reaching forward to stroke my fingers. “Of course it’s true,” she said. “You knew in your heart it was true.”
* * *
I cried for a while, yielding to the liquor and the drama of the moment, resting my head on the glass top of the table. Sidney sat close to me and braided my hair, three thin locks at a time. It was a ritual from childhood, one that I’d always found lovely and soothing, that Sidney had abandoned when I requested it so often that it got on her nerves.
“I found out pretty organically, on my own, around the end of college,” she said, when my crying had subsided to a soft whimper. “I’m almost surprised the same thing didn’t happen to you—I mean it surprises me that any Korean-American who lived through the riots wouldn’t be fascinated by the subject.”
I felt slightly chastised but didn’t have the will to defend myself. I listened miserably, recognizing that I was drunk and that Sidney was remarkably sober.
“I’m not blaming you or anything,” she added. “You were only a baby, and you were never interested in this kind of thing anyway.”
It was a running joke in our family, one that felt especially barbed coming from Sidney. My curiosities were limited to math and science, stories of monsters and aliens, a small scattered handful of subjects that shone vivid in the landscape of knowledge. I had only vague knowledge of the wars I’d lived through, could never remember who was on the Supreme Court.
“Anyway, I was really interested in the role of the Korean-American community in the riots. I became kind of obsessed with Soon Ja Du, and once that happened, it didn’t take long for me to find Jiyeon Kim.”
I turned my head slightly to look at her. I didn’t want her to stop touching my hair. “How did you find out that was Mom?”
She bent her neck to a quizzical angle. “You saw the pictures, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they were pictures of Mom. I don’t know how you get around that.”
I cried some more. She was right. They were pictures of our mother.
“And besides, the whole thing, it corresponded to a few weird things I remembered from when I was seven. I know we moved then, and I remember once seeing a stranger hiss at her at the market. Funny though—I didn’t recall a name change, but maybe I was still young enough that I didn’t think of her by her name.”
“So this is why you stopped talking to Mom.” My voice bounced off the glass and reverberated, thick and petulant, in my ears.
“One of the reasons,” she said. “I tried to live with it for a while, even flirted with denial.”
“You already knew when you brought Kenechi home.”
She nodded. “I legitimately liked Kenechi, but I guess you can say I used him. I subjected him to that awful weekend as a test for Mom.”
“And she failed.”
“She failed completely, and then I couldn’t give her any benefit of doubt. I confronted her about Darius and that was that.”
“That was that? What about now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It may not seem like it, but I’ve felt bad about cutting her off. The thing with Kenechi aside, it’s not like she ever did anything to hurt me. But even now, it’s hard for me to look at her.”
“It was good of you to come.”
She nodded, and I saw the glint of a tear in her left eye. “You know what she said to me? That when she thought she was going to die, she couldn’t stop seeing my face. That it was worth getting shot to have her daughter back home.”
I felt the s
tinging envy of the prodigal son’s obedient brother. If Sidney left without forgiving our mother, she would have a clutch on her heart that I could hardly rival. My mind chased after this aching train of thought until I’d almost forgotten the initial reason for my misery.
“But what about you?” Sidney asked, echoing my inner monologue without the pitiful tone. “Are you going to say anything to Mom?”
I’d never been anything but honest with my mother. She’d encouraged me to confide in her, and I hadn’t done much that I’d wanted to hide. “How can I not?” I asked. “This is so big, unni.”
“You’d be accusing her of murder.”
“But it’s not an accusation if it’s true. I just want to know why.”
She shook her head. “Think hard about this, Grace. Think about whether she’ll tell you anything you want to hear.” I could feel her braiding faster. “Do you want to hear her defend herself? What do you think that would sound like?”
I sat up and rubbed my eyes, breaking away from Sidney’s touch. “I don’t know, that it was a scary, confusing time, hell on earth, that she lost her mind?” I was almost shouting.
“Do you want to hear her say that black people were acting like animals escaped from the zoo? That she was scared for her life that a black monster would rob, rape, and kill her in her sleep?” She shuddered and poured out another shot of soju, not bothering with the lemon. “Do you want to hear her say that he was big for a thirteen year old boy?”
I was shaking now, and she pointed angrily to my topped off glass. I emptied it and started crying again.
“Do you want to hear those words come out of your mother’s mouth? The same mouth that sang to you when you couldn’t sleep at night?”
I shook my head. “Of course not.”
“Then don’t ask,” she said. “Just don’t ask.”
Sidney went back to Chicago the day after our mother came home. The parting was peaceful, as cordial and open-ended as any of us could have hoped. But I no longer fantasized about the tearful reconciliation, the restoration of our family to a unit of four. For the first time since the rupture, I saw our family clearly: only two of us knew Jiwoo Park, and only two of us loved her. Our father had always known her and had forgiven her sins with his whole heart. Sidney had plumbed the blackest depths of her soul and had lost the vital feeling that compelled filial attachment. Tenderness remained, but it was a pale echo of love.
I never brought up my mother’s past, and I was relieved when her shooting became old news. The rumors never led to a bigger story, and when my parents moved to another city, nothing followed on their backs.
I stayed behind, got an apartment, learned how to cook my own meals. I fashioned a comfortable independence, and over time, without agony, I figured out what I might want out of life. I called my mother once a week to see how she was doing. I loved her, and I wished her well.
GHOSTS OF AUGUST
According to Chinese folklore, the gates of Hell are opened during the month of August, and hungry ghosts are free to wreak havoc among the living.
by
Henry Chang
— :: —
He wiped the sweat off the back of his neck and pulled out a folder from the bottom drawer of the nightstand. Inside the folder was a single yellowed news clipping from the Daily News, which he folded back into a V. He stood it in the bright summer light flooding the window sill.
He rubbed his eyes. His rent-controlled Chinatown tenement apartment, a bachelor’s pad, was so toasty he couldn’t sleep without running the air conditioner all night. His bedroom came to silence as he turned the cooler off.
He took a deep calming breath through his nose, held it before letting it rush out between his thin lips. On one side of the folded clipping, dated 8/8/88, was the text of the article under the headline Naked Chinatown Corpse Identified.
The article read:
A naked female corpse found last week in Chinatown’s Columbus Park was identified as Julie Miller. She had a history as a runaway from West Virginia, police sources said. Foul play is indicated by detectives from the Fifth Precinct, which declined further comment on the continuing homicide investigation.
Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers 1-800-555-TIPS.
The investigation was now a twenty five year old cold case.
Julie Miller was a high school dropout and had run away twice from troubled families in West Virginia, it was reported.
On the other side of the folded article was a black and white photo of a fresh faced young woman with a warm but guarded smile. Like a high school girl he thought. He remembered the green eye shadow she wore when she first arrived in Chinatown, a shade none of the Chinatown girls wore since they weren’t white and didn’t see the world through green eyes. Julie’s eyes were hypnotic, and he knew the photo didn’t do her justice.
He bunched his shoulders and rolled his neck, felt the tugging weight of his twenty five years at the teller window of the Chinatown Off Track Betting parlor. He’d sold tickets to every high roller and lowlife, every waiter and da jop who walked into the Chinatown branch. His fingers had touched more than sixty million cash over the years, he figured, and the chaan ji tips on top of that had averaged an extra two hundred a week tax-free windfall for him. He recalled the smell of new money around Chinese New Year, fresh and crispy clean bills, and old money, dirty and greasy bills that smelled like cigarette smoke and fry oil from the restaurant kitchens.
Money from bank managers and business owners. Cash from gangbangers and pimps, drug dealers and addicts, and even fistfuls of slimy coins from the homeless drunks of the Lower East Side.
Ten thousand faces flashing by in the view of his bulletproof teller’s window. He’d seen many faces he didn’t want to see, and noticed some Chinatown people who always seemed to avoid his window. Money, bet money, laundering itself in the cycle of Chinatown organized crime; the tongs and their underworld cronies, with the muscle of the street gangs led by their dailos. The triad hustlers from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan. All pitching in cash and washing their money.
Money from illegal gambling, drugs, prostitution, loan sharking, counterfeit goods, and bootleg cigarettes was cleaned in the Chinese Laundry that was the Chinatown OTB.
All in the past now.
After twenty five years he’d had enough. Taking bettors faces into his dreams. Now his pension was two thousand a month, and coupled with some part time numbers action, he’d shaped a comfortable retired life. Comfortable for Chinatown anyway.
His thoughts abruptly came back to Julie Miller and her startling green eyes, the kind you’d expect on a blonde, not a brunette. Eyes that had demanded honesty, and truth, before the lies and confessions of Chinatown boyz moved her enough to open her heart, her lips, her legs.
She was twenty six at the time of her death.
The last time he saw her alive was two years before that, at a reunion at Grampa’s Bar and Grill, a local dive on East Broadway. She’d been queen of the night that evening, everyone buying her drinks, toasting her. Twenty guys later bragging how they’d fucked her.
He placed a rice bowl full of glass marbles onto the sill. I’m not the superstitious type, he thought, but a lot of bad things have happened in August, the Ghost month. Who needs extra bad luck, right? So, a small offering to keep the hungry ghosts away should suffice.
He took a Hershey bar from the refrigerator and placed it in front of her News photo. She’d always liked Hershey bars. It would melt, he knew, but he didn’t care. It was just for the day. Bot yuet sup ng, August 15. Ghost day.
He lit up eight sticks of incense, nodded at the photo before jabbing them into the bowl of marbles. He retrieved an empty moon cake tin from beneath his bed, placed it near the window. He’d make his own offerings to the ghosts, burning ceremonial paper items he’d found in the Chinatown Buddhist and funerary shops.
He burned a miniature pair of Chinese slippers, the bright green paper curling up in a fiery plume dis
sipating in the light of the window.
He burned a tiny mink coat, its paper blackness collapsing into ashes inside the moon cake tin.
He torched the little red cardboard Mercedes last. She’d always wanted a cool set of wheels.
The ashes filled half the tin and he frowned at the bright sill before heading for the bathroom, where he needed to shave.
The face in the mirror looked old, fifty five, but still defiant. He saw the sunken wrinkles under his eyes, the frown at the corner of his lips. You are one old motherfucker, Joe Chin, he thought, but it sure beats being dead.
He twisted the old style faucet and ran water over his hands, spread the coolness over his arms and chest, his shoulders. Defying the August humidity. The shaving foam was minty but the razor bit and drew blood, stinging him. He let the blood run, a thin red line curving toward his chin.
He closed his eyes, flashing back more than a quarter century, remembering when Julie Miller first appeared in Chinatown.
“There’s this green-eyed white girl,” the street dudes had reported, “they say she’s a freak.” These comments from the Dirty Dozen, some of the ugliest lowlifes in Chinatown. Other street guys in the park hooted, and yelled out “Blowjob!” as she passed by. “Hand job!” she’d yell back teasingly, flipping them her middle finger.
He wiped off the blood line, closed his eyes to the sting. What appeared next inside his forehead was a thirty year old memory of a naked white girl on a dirty bare mattress in a Chinatown ghetto basement beneath the Manhattan Bridge. In the dim light that filtered in through the filthy windows, he could see Krazy on top of her, plowing her beneath the thin dingy sheet that partially covered them. There was no grunting or groaning and eleven other Chinese misfits waited their turn in a drooling silence. The Dirty Dozen he remembered, was how they were known on the streets. They were all ABC, American Born Chinese, spoke perfect working class NYC English but virtually no Chinese dialect. Newer Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong derisively referred to them as ‘jook sings’, empty pieces of bamboo, lacking in the strength and wisdom of Chinese culture and language. They don’t even know their Chinese half that makes them whole. Other people in the neighborhood called them pieces of shit lowlifes.
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