Re Jane

by Patricia Park

  Sang left Hwan in charge at the store so he could take his father to the Statue of Liberty, on a Circle Line cruise, and on a horse-drawn carriage ride in Central Park. Yet another steady stream of criticisms emerged from Re Myungsun’s lips: This ferry ride was too slow—they should market an express route. This carriage smelled like a pigpen. This hotdog was too greasy—no wonder the American people were so fat. With every such comment, a look of exhaustion would flood over Sang’s face. It almost made me feel sorry for him.

  When Re Myungsun was out of earshot, Hannah said her father-in-law was no better than a baby who could neither wipe nor feed himself. It was a rare moment when Hannah took me into her confidence. “I never understood why my friends complained when their relatives came to visit. But now I do. They come here thinking they can just sit back and relax, like kings. Everything fancy-fancy, so they can go show off back home. Like they think we don’t have businesses to run or bills to pay?”

  In the days away from Thorn Street, everything I learned at the Mazer-Farley household began to disappear. And yet, back at Gates Street, there was a hitch to my herky-jerky movements, as I’d stop myself from asking a nunchi-less question while helping out in the kitchen or slicing fruit without peeling it first. Shedding newly acquired customs and reassimilating to a former way of life is a painful transition. I could not beat against the forceful current of Sang and Hannah’s ways, and as the days passed, I had no choice but to acquiesce—borne back to the rhythms of the past.

  Each restless night under Sang’s roof, I endured Mary’s snores and the sounds of the house settling uneasily into place. I remembered my first night at Thorn, tossing and turning as I heard the springs in their master bedroom squeak and creak. I’m hoping to rekindle things with Ed. Beth . . . is brilliant. I ached with jealousy. I would return to Brooklyn only to find I’d become nothing to Ed.

  In those small hours of the night, whenever some particular memory of Ed would flare up—the way he’d smiled at me at McDonald’s or how he’d tucked my hair back from my face the night after Twine—I’d force some corresponding memory to override it: Ed stroking Beth’s back, the look they’d exchange across the breakfast table in the early days, those damn bedsprings. On the chart I’d created in my mind, Beth clearly ranked so much higher than me:

  As if I stood a chance.

  Falling in love with Ed Farley had not been part of the plan. But, reader! I did. Try as I might, I could not stop my feelings. And never had I loved him so well.

  * * *

  Because (according to Hannah) Re Myungsun was expecting fancy-fancy, Sang took the family to dinner at Windows on the World. I thought for sure my grandfather would be impressed, as everyone at church had been. Even Nina had remarked, “Look at you, all high class,” when I’d mentioned it to her. (While Beth and Devon checked in just once in my absence, and I had no communication with Ed, Nina and I spoke on the phone almost every night.)

  We drove into the city, traffic all the way. When we stood at the foot of the Twin Towers, Hannah pointed up to the buildings. “Father-in-Law, isn’t this amazing? Sometimes I can’t believe man can build something like this.”

  Re Myungsun said, “How can you compare anything man-made to the pure beauty of nature? This will never be as amazing as Kumgang Mountain.” His tone was oddly philosophical, his expression uncharacteristically placid. But then, as we soared up the elevator of the North Tower, our ears popping with the change in air pressure, he righted his voice to its usual note of superiority. “And anyway, Sinnara Incorporated is breaking ground for a skyscraper that will be even taller than your twin buildings.”

  Sang stared impatiently at the numbers lighting up each floor: 80, 81, 82. The elevator could not go fast enough. He faced me and said sharply, “Isn’t Lowood office inside here? What they say when you calling them?”

  I was scheduled to go into the office the following week. The company had lifted its hiring freeze and was calling back previous candidates. But I had already told Sang that.

  I looked over at George. He was wearing a T-shirt that read EAT MY SHORTs. Yet no one said anything to him. I looked at Mary. As usual, her clothes were two sizes too tight. She’d once managed to squeeze into a size zero after a week on a cabbage-soup diet. The next week her body rebounded, but she’d been in denial ever since, and no one said anything to her either.

  The hostess greeted us when we finally arrived up at the restaurant. We must have seemed like a ragtag bunch in her eyes—George’s and Mary’s clothes, Sang’s creased work trousers, Re Myungsun’s sour expression. “How are you folks this evening?” she said, leading the way to our table. She was probably new. I could tell by the way she nervously gripped the stack of menus. Sang’s and Hannah’s eyes crinkled into smiles, but they didn’t speak—they grew shy around unfamiliar American people. Then she looked up expectantly at Re Myungsun. But he did not answer either. I couldn’t see his expression just then, but I knew exactly what face was staring back at her—cold, unfeeling, dismissive.

  Suddenly she dropped her menus—they scattered across the floor.

  “I’m so sorry!” she said, falling to her knees to scoop them up. “I’m so sorry, it’s my first day.” She spoke with a flat, nasal tone. It was clear she wasn’t from around here.

  Just then a man across the room—her boss, presumably—gestured at her with a curled finger. See me. I hoped she wasn’t going to be fired.

  At the table Sang and Hannah insisted Re Myungsun take the seat with the best view. As he lowered himself into his chair, he grunted with displeasure. “Doesn’t this place have private rooms?”

  Hannah caught my eye and shook her head with exasperation.

  “Father, enjoy the openness,” Sang said. “Closed rooms are tap-tap-hae.”

  Sang ordered the filet mignon for his father and chicken for the rest of us. There were six of us and only five entrées; Hannah and I were to share. My ears were consumed with the sounds of the family eating. I watched Sang crunch down on a piece of baguette with his front teeth, chicken and potato gratin stuffed into each cheek. Eventually he swallowed the chicken-potato pulp, and the mashed baguette slid into the newly vacated space. That was how he always ate: transforming his mouth into an assembly line, the way we rushed deliveries off the truck and into the store.

  Mary kept touching the tines of her fork to her mouth in thought, as schoolgirls did with pencils. She ate with her lips smacking together, her tongue shuttling food from side to side, pausing occasionally to dip into the pool of saliva. Chyap-chyap. It was a recently acquired habit, something she must have picked up in those Barnard dining halls. She thought it made her look cute.

  Hannah scraped the bones—cartilage, too—of our joint chicken clean. When she saw I hadn’t touched my pile of meat, she forklifted it onto her son’s plate. George’s eyes went blank as he shoved the chicken into his mouth. All the while Re Myungsun groused about his oily vegetables, his tough steak. To the other diners, we must have looked like chonnom—country bumpkins.

  Just when I thought the meal could not get any more tap-tap-hae, Re Myungsun stopped chewing his subpar steak and said to me, “You look different from when you were a child. Your poor Emo. The looks people gave her when she took you out.”

  “My Emo?”

  Emo was Sang and my mother’s younger sister, their junior by more than a decade. My cousins and I had never met her, and it must have been more than thirty years since the last time Sang had seen his baby sister. After Sang immigrated to the States, he never went back.

  But Re Myungsun was studying me again, with the same scrutiny with which he’d examined his dinner plate. “But you look more Korean now. How fortunate.”

  When I didn’t say anything, Hannah nudged me. “Say thank you,” she whispered.

  But instead of forcing my head into a bow of thanks, I asked, in my tentative Korean, “Why fortunate?”

 
; Re Myungsun had the put-out expression of someone who was trying to offer a compliment. “A Korean person should look Korean.”

  Sang put down his fork and knife and shot me a look: nunchi.

  I proceeded all the same. “So that making me Korean now?”

  Re Myungsun was shaking his head. “Your character must take after your father,” as though they were a binary—everything my mother was not, my father must have been.

  “But what about—” I ventured haltingly.

  Sang shut me down with a sharp look.

  Hannah shut me down with a sharp pinch to the leg.

  —my mother? was all I had wanted to ask.

  * * *

  After the dismal meal, we dropped Re Myungsun on Thirty-second and Broadway, where he was meeting a friend for a drink. One of us was to return to the city to pick him up after he was done. On the drive back to Flushing, Mary complained about our grandfather’s comment on her round face. Hannah pointed out that it was a compliment: she had the kind of classic face Koreans preferred. “That’s not what my friends from Seoul say,” Mary retorted bitterly. Her chubby cheeks had a rosy tint. She had big eyes that were reduced to slivered moons when she smiled. It was a face more cute than beautiful. Hannah told her daughter to spend less time worrying about her face and more time worrying about her body. Then George, who sat in the passenger seat, turned the radio on to Hot 97 and mouthed along with the rapping. Sang yelled over the music to Mary, “You stop picking on Grandpa!” He took hold of the dial and switched it to AM 1010 WINS News. The view of the abandoned warehouses and the swamp and Shea and the U-Haul clock tower came rushing at us. We were almost home.

  * * *

  I was still thinking about what my grandfather had said to me when it came time to pick him up from the city. Hannah handed me the car keys. “You drive for your uncle,” she said. “Look how tired he looks.” Sang and I piled into the car. We drove for those first few minutes with only 1010 WINS humming in the background. I remembered something Beth had once suggested to me. “Why not open up more to your uncle?” she’d said, blowing the steam (and dust) from her cup of tea. “I suspect you’ve never actually tried to create an intimate environment conducive to conversation.”

  “Uncle, about dinner,” I started, lowering the dial on the radio. “What was all that stuff Grandfather was talking about before?”

  Sang was staring out the window, at the storefronts of Northern Boulevard rushing by. We looped onto the Van Wyck. “How I suppose to know?”

  “You know . . . about Emo. Taking me around and . . .” The looks people gave her. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.

  Sang spoke. “Who else you think care for you before you coming to America? Your mother?”

  That shut me up quick.

  When we approached the entrance ramp to the LIE, he said, “Exit over there! Don’t miss!”

  “I know, Uncle. I’ve only been down this road my whole life.” I hadn’t meant to slip into sarcasm, but I hated driving with Sang—he was a constant backseat driver. After I steered us onto the expressway, we lapsed back into silence.

  I broke the silence. “So you know, my bosses? They think you and I should talk about our feel—”

  “What Lowood say?” he interrupted. “They gonna give your job back?”

  “I already told you what they said.” My frustration was mounting. “For once I wish you’d stop interrupting me. I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”

  “What Uncle say about sharing private family problems to outside world?”

  “I wasn’t sharing our—”

  “Uncle try to understand,” he interrupted, his voice softening into his rare “let’s compromise” tone. “New experience for you, living American people. Such fun time! But now fun time over. Now time for you coming home.”

  “I’m not leaving my job,” I said.

  Sang raised the volume on the radio. All news, all the time. Traffic and transit on the ones. Two lanes closed for construction on the BQE eastbound. Congestion on the upper and lower levels of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge westbound. Overturned tractor-trailer on the Triborough. Traffic steady westbound through the Midtown Tunnel.

  “Greenpoint! Greenpoint!” Sang pointed at the fast-approaching exit ramp. As it flashed from windshield to rearview mirror, he shouted, “What’s wrong you, why you not pay attention? Go right lane. Not too late. Still you can get out Van Dam, last exit.” Sang hated the Midtown Tunnel. He preferred the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, because it had no tolls.

  I pointed at the radio. “Didn’t you hear? They said there’s traffic on the bridge.”

  “But Fifty-nine Street still the better way!”

  “Why do you always have to yell at me?” I said.

  Sang winced. I realized that my tone had taken on a Mary-like whine. “Because you going stupid way, is why!”

  “You know, you could learn a thing or two from my boss. He’s not like you: all criticisms, all the time. He actually compliments me once in a while.”

  I did and didn’t know why I excluded Beth from my comment.

  Sang chuffed. “What Uncle always telling you? Beware people giving compliments free, like water. Even water not free.” He pointed again to the next exit. “Get in right lane, I say!”

  All my life Sang barked the orders and I obeyed them. All my life I’d been expected to put aside my opinions and desires in favor of his. I felt a roiling rage—han—building up inside me.

  I stepped harder on the accelerator. “I’m taking the Midtown Tunnel.” And there was nothing he could do about it.

  At the entrance to the tunnel, Sang muttered, “Tap-tap-hae.” He was right. The very air of the car was thick with an uncomfortable, constricting tension. Sang kept rubbing his chest—holding back an explosion of rage, I knew—and he squeezed his eyes shut. The tunnel lights flashed a sickening shade of yellow inside the car. We did not speak a word.

  When we emerged on the other side, Sang barked, “Pull over.” He bolted from the car—he was that furious with me—and doubled over to catch his breath, hands clenching his knees, his face white with anger.

  When he regained his breathing and returned to the car, his lips made a tight, stern line. More and more he was coming to resemble Re Myungsun. He motioned for me to get out of the driver’s side with a jerk of his head.

  “Starting tomorrow you listening me,” Sang said as he settled behind the wheel, the car still in park. “Even if Lowood reject you again, don’t matter. You gonna stay home. You not going back that family.”

  I loosened my grip on the handle of the car door. I set my jaw. Each time I took a step forward, Sang was there to drag me back—a push-and-pull as jerky as the 7 train.

  “I’m old enough to make my own decisions,” I said, “and I’m not coming back home.”

  Sang looked strangely nervous, as if he were treading somewhere he didn’t wish to tread. “Uncle not trusting your boss.”

  “You don’t trust any American person.”

  “He look at you funny way!” he finally burst out. “Uncle not liking it.”

  A defiant little thrill ran through me. So maybe Ed did feel something for me—and Sang had picked up on it. But I played dumb. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Sang went on. “Nunchi-do umnya?” Don’t you have any nunchi?

  It was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer it.

  We were still pulled off to the side of the road. The car was thick and stuffy. I pried open the passenger side door. Immediately the air, though filled with car exhaust, felt sweeter.

  “Ya, Jane!” Sang shouted. “Where you going?”

  “Tap-tap-hae.”

  “Come back here!”

  I started walking away.

  “Come back!”

  I heard the car roaring to lif
e, and Sang pulled up beside me.

  “Fine.” He was speaking in Korean. He took a hand off the steering wheel and sliced it through the air, as if to say, Not my problem anymore. “Fine.”

  He lingered for just a beat—maybe waiting for some apology I wasn’t going to give.

  “Tap-tap-hae,” I repeated.

  He spoke again. “Eat well and live well,” he said. And then he drove off.

  Eat well and live well. The closest English equivalent would probably be “Have a nice life.”

  * * *

  Sang’s words continued to ring in my ears as I walked south. I had the vague idea that I’d return to 646 Thorn. I reached the foot of Manhattan; I could walk no more. I found a pay phone and with trembling fingers dialed the number to the Mazer-Farley phone. As soon as I heard Ed’s voice on the other end of the line, it all felt right. He would come for me.

  I didn’t know the feeling of relief after returning home from an absence. I had only known what it was like to return to Gates Street after working at Food—the cold dread of being scolded at the dinner table. But once I stepped into his car, all the recent chilliness dissipated. We were back to the natural rapport of our late-night hero sessions. I was already home.

  “That’s so like you,” Ed said as we left Manhattan and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. “You get all the way to the tip of the city before calling for help.”

  “I thought I could make it back on my own. I didn’t want to be a bother.”

  “Humph,” he said, though his tone was light. “A typical Janian reply.”

  But instead of driving us back to 646 Thorn Street, Ed got off the bridge and pulled up to the Promenade. Through the windshield the Towers, pearl gray, loomed back at us. Their reflection glinted off the surface of the East River. He stopped the car. “I used to come out here a lot as a kid,” Ed said. “Long after the whole house was asleep. I’d just stare across the water into the city.”