by Mia Yun
Mommy sits in the front with the driver, who resembles a sea captain in a white shirt, white cotton gloves and a white cap. (On his white, blade-lined shirtsleeve, an epaulette is stitched, saying MODEL DRIVER.) She is stiff-shouldered like a mannequin and looks tense, tightly clutching the half-circle handles of a paisley-patterned fake Gucci bag on her lap. Staring hard into the blank page that is the future, through the rain-streaming taxi window where busybody windshield wipers work nonstop, clearing a twin set of folding fans. Ahead of us, the squash yellow Hyundai Pony with Daddy crawls through the traffic, carrying our rain-splattered brand-new suitcases in the trunk. We can see the lid, held down with a rope, bounce up and down, dripping water, like a crocodile’s jaw clamping down on its prey.
We’re emigrating to America. Leaving everything behind: the old Japanese matchbox house; the one Mommy calls “the bad-luck house”; Grandma at the apple orchard in the countryside; and all the good and bad memories that will take years to congeal. Severing all ties, as if that were possible. Putting all the persistent and insistent memories on hold. We are leaving. For many new beginnings. For a spit-shined bright, everything-possible, desires-to-reality future. In America. Foremost and all, for Inah, whose face below the straight paintbrush bangs is permanently disfigured with burn scars. Because a girl like her has no future in Korea. In America, she will go to the best schools, and become all that she can be. Definitely NOT in the U.S. Army, but an astronaut, maybe, in a silver-white space suit, a scientist, maybe, in a sparkling lab, and even a veterinarian in a zoo! But most of all, in America, kids won’t call her names (there are only good kids in America) and people won’t stare at her face on the streets and cluck their tongues in pity. And in “God-blessed” America, the land of uncommon miracles, she might even get a new face. Mommy says all this, whispering, lest any jealous god or ghost might hear it. And as if it’s not yet safe to voice hopes.
But Inah and I, who inhabit a tiny world made up of small, concrete and immediate-resulting things, don’t grasp the meaning of leaving. We are just two impressionable, moldable, formless children excited about a plane trip to America. Too young for regrets or sorrows. Too young to have a sense of history, of belonging and of country. Even the memory of all that has happened for now is all but forgotten, too, pushed into the place where memory goes for a long hibernation to reemerge later.
Instead, with a child’s delight, we marvel at the imposing sight of the huge tanks parked around City Hall plaza in downtown Seoul where the fountain is spewing up tall gray columns of water. Unaware that it has been a bloody spring in Korea and that, barely a month ago, the lives of hundreds of people were ruthlessly snuffed out in a horrible bloodbath in a city called Kwangju in the south—a place more remote in our consciousness than America. And blessedly oblivious of that sense of fear and foreboding that hangs over the wet, grainy capital under martial law, slip-sliding by the rain-spattered taxi window.
To Inah and me, for years to come, 1980 will simply mean the year we left Korea and emigrated to America. Until we start to remember and begin to understand and sort out the meaning. Only then would we guess that at that very moment, Daddy, in the other taxi, wasn’t feeling excited like us, but very sad. Leaving the country where he was born and had lived for fifty years on account of such small, selfish reasons: mere personal gain and happiness. Fleeing the country others were willing to give their lives for. To live like a refugee in another country, one eye always looking homeward the rest of his life. How as the taxi passed the Ducksoo Palace, Daddy was thinking of us, how Inah and I would never get to grow up and appreciate the beauty of the tall, very tall, vermilion wooden gates and the swirling roof lines; the beauty that every Korean should appreciate without trying, as it runs in our blood.
Inah gets excited as we get nearer to the airport. Now, on both sides of the rain-slicked highway, it is miles of nothing but rice paddies, a carpet of vivid green in the rain, disappearing toward the foggy horizon. Inah loudly wonders how our plane will find its way. The sky doesn’t have paved roads or traffic signals or road posts arrow-pointing to America. She worries that our plane might fall down from the sky when it gets too tired after staying up there too long.
Inside the airport building with tall gymnasium ceilings, in a mad confused rush, Inah and I fly alongside Mommy across a huge room flooded with pale green fluorescent lights, past steep-slide escalators, rows of identical seats, automatic open-shut doors, parades of moving feet and ginger-ale-colored faces. Anxious, and disoriented by the zinging microphone voices and the bee-in-the-sac hums. Daddy wheels a cart where mammoth-sized suitcases crammed with everything we own perch precariously on top of one another, dwarfing him behind it.
“Stay close,” Mommy says in her unreal-sounding voice that escapes us like pieces of ripped paper thrown in the wind. Instinctively, Inah and I reach for each other’s clammy hands and hook our fingers. Daddy parks the cart at the tail end of a long line where a crush of people and suitcases and carts spread out like wiggly octopus legs.
Later, standing outside the departure gate, ringed by relatives and family friends who have come to see us off, the corners of Mommy’s mouth crumble, and before we know it she is sobbing.
“Why does she cry, Daddy?”
“She is sad.”
“Oh?!”
Mommy sobs on, and her shoulders jerk. Puzzled and anxious, Inah and I tightly clutch her crepe de chine skirt, which collapses in our hands like puffed-up, hollow-inside bread.
“No more tears! You’re scaring the children,” scolds Mommy’s brash cousin with a stiff bouffant hairdo, pushing up her brown-tinted butterfly sunglasses way too big for her face. She hands Mommy a stiff white handkerchief that reeks of naphthalene mothballs. “It’s not like you’re going to a place of no return!
“Besides, it’s now the jet age. Not like the old days. Everything’s easy now. You can always come back for a visit. And you’re leaving for your children. You should be happy instead of being sad like this.” Mommy tries to smile, but her mouth crumbles again. Daddy looks away.
“How true! Wipe your tears and go in before it’s too late and you miss the plane. I’m not coming out to the airport to see you off again! Traffic is so bad. Ha, ha.” Mommy jabs her eyes dry with the stiff handkerchief.
“Now you, Inah and Yunah. You have to grow up to do great things and make your parents proud. And don’t ever forget you’re Korean.” We nod. Daddy says we should get going. Mommy pulls at the innocent straps of our book bags, which are loaded down with books she picked for us from our Complete Children’s Collection of Great People’s Life Stories: of Helen Keller, Madame Curie, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale and Yu Kwan Soon, the Korean girl patriot. Mommy turns and waves and waves until the automatic door shuts on her face. Then as we hurry through the departure ramp in a last-minute dash, her eyes start brimming with tears again.
Somewhere over the Pacific, the novelty of flying for the first time wears off for Inah and me, and the restless long hours turn into a blur. Leaving only fragmented memories of the striped airline blankets and the scratchy pillows, slipped off and lying scattered and bunched at our feet; of the blue plastic meal trays that come with minipackets of salt and pepper and Coffee-mate; of the vaguely nauseating smell of warmed-over meals; of the ding-ding sounds that go off with the seat-belt signs; of Mommy’s puffy eyes; and of Daddy tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable in his sleep.
By the time the plane touches down in Anchorage for a stopover, Inah and I have completely lost all sense of time and place. (This lack of a sense of place will follow us for years.) Disoriented and carrying our buzzing heads and wobbly legs, we walk with Mommy and Daddy around the Anchorage Airport. We stand in front of a tall glass display case and point at the gigantic roaring Alaskan grizzly bear. At the snack bar, we make Daddy spend precious dollars for tempura udon to fish up a few fat, bloated strands of noodle from the Styrofoam cups with the splintery wooden chopsticks. Then we troop upstairs to the
lookout lounge. Outside the tall glass wall, predawn Alaska stands as an immense blue sky and majestic walls of snowcapped mountains. Windswept. Still in prehistoric time. Moonstone blue, cerulean blue and periwinkle. Inah and I stare out in awed silence.
For the rest of the flight, from Alaska all the way to New York, Inah and I sleep, dead to the world. Squished like insects between Mommy and Daddy, breathing in the sour sweat smell of the striped blankets. Dreaming no dreams.
Floating through a sea of blue. When Mommy wakes us up, we’re circling over rainy New York. Mommy says it’s midnight, and we’ll have to hurry. She fusses over us, combing our hair and smoothing out the wrinkles in our clothes. But Inah and I can barely keep our eyes open.
Dazed, after the hurried walk through a long, endless corridor in tight-feeling shoes, after the immigration and the customs inspections, Inah and I follow Mommy and Daddy and the luggage out of the automatic sliding door. Never noticing the famous Emma Lazarus poem engraved on the bronze panel that graces the wall we pass by. The poem Inah and I will later read out loud through the murky and scratched Plexiglas partition, and puzzle about its meaning as we wait for our jet-lagged relatives to arrive from Korea (with bird-nest spots on the back of their heads, missed in the last-minute combing, and the smell of stale airline food and bathroom cologne on their clothes just like us, but carrying genuine Gucci bags with them and dressed in much nicer clothes than us):
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
TWO
In Venice, it rains every day. In intermittent downpours and soundless drizzles. Everything turns damp and soggy; the mildewed walls, crumpled sheets and wrinkled clothes. Venice transforms into a water-clogged, dank and dark and moody catacomb, floating in the lurching and churning, sloshing and murmuring water. At the flooded Piazza San Marco, tourists are seen wading around in knee-deep water.
I am afraid Inah’s mood isn’t much better than the weather. One minute, as though holding inside her a whole angry black sea, barely containable, she is tense, irritable, bristling and sarcastic, and the next, paralyzed with lethargy, she’s glum and quiet and looks as alive as a gutted fish. She still resents it, the trip Mom and I literally forced on her (she acts as if it’s the last thing she wants to be doing), but it has to be more than that. It is something she isn’t willing to put, or capable of putting, into words. So she is just going to make it maddeningly difficult and torturous for both of us.
I knew better and should have known better, but it’s still such a huge disappointment to me. To find her at the same struggling place. I’d thought and hoped, in my naiveté, that after all that traveling and wandering she would have found some peace, having arrived at that inner place of calm. Obviously, I was wrong. If anything, her struggle seems even more tortured and intense.
So stuck together and with nothing better to do, Inah and I chug on joylessly in rainy Venice. Under the limp and water-smudged sky. Shapeless in rain ponchos we buy from a store on busy Lista di Spagna. Tracing and retracing our steps, over rain-streaked bridges, up and down the echoing, cold and shiny marble stairs of museums and palazzi, and entering and leaving dim, musty churches. Trying to concentrate on the exterior and not to get on each other’s nerves. Like a long, unhappily married couple who grudgingly put up with each other’s nonsensical behavior just to keep peace.
But it doesn’t always work. In the morning, after a shower, Inah slips into a T-shirt, jeans and soggy sneakers, and she’s ready to get out the door. So she sits and fumes over having to wait for me. She can barely hide her contempt at the way I dress, or the makeup I put on. Are you really wearing that, she says, or rolls her eyes when I dab lipstick or apply a quick coat of mascara. I laugh it off. Just to keep the peace (which has quickly become my mantra in Venice). It goes more or less the same way for the rest of the day, with her goading and kneading and uttering sarcastic and curt remarks. She just can’t help herself.
That’s what I find most depressing—that no matter how hard she tries or we try, there’s no escaping from what happened. There is going to be no ending to this struggle Inah’s locked into. And it’s as though I’ve come all the way here merely to reconfirm that.
But sometimes, walking with her across a rain-drumming piazza or standing on a vaporetto traversing the swollen and gray Grand Canal where rain is sometimes like fog, the reality hits me with such crushing sadness that all I want to do is just disappear. Run away from her. As far away as I can. Because it’s too much to witness her struggle up so close. But running away is not even an option for me. I simply have no right to do that to her or Mom. So I will just have to stay and take whatever she gives me. It’s the price I have to pay. Again and again. But isn’t it such a small price to pay compared to what she has gone through and is going through and will go through?
THREE
Flushing is a sea. A baptismal sea that churns out New Americans. It admits a constant influx of new people, not so much from other parts of America as from the rest of the world, people who come from other continents across seas and deserts and rivers and over mountains. You see them everywhere in Flushing. On the subway. On the street. At stores. The new people. You can always tell them right away from the way they dress or wear their hair; or from the language they speak or the subtle scents they carry; or from other such myriads of small things. Some carry their villages in their walk, and others wear the terrain they come from on their faces. As unmistakable as their hard-to-erase accents.
It never ceases to amaze me that they all find their way and manage to build a new life here. It seems a miracle that they all somehow survive. Some of them come here with nothing. Nothing but memories and a dream and a will. Some smuggled in as stowaways on a ship. So awfully unprepared. But even they manage. Most of them, anyway. They find places to live. They find work. They put food on the table for their families. They buy their first TV set. Their first dining-room table. Their first car. Their first apartment or house. And their children start school, and are on their way to becoming Americans. It’s nothing special. Really. As they say, people do it every day. And so many people have done it before them. And so many will do it, long, long after them. And after all, we did that. There’s no mystery at all. Remember? Once we were that new people on the street, shopping for our first whatever, and once we were the kids on the street in our fresh-off-the-boat clothes. But I don’t remember how we did it. It was our parents’ responsibility to put food on the table, to buy that first TV set and the first house. All Inah and I had to do was grow up.
The summer we arrived in America, we temporarily stayed with Uncle Shin’s family in their white house in Bayside. That’s where we had our very first July Fourth. I still remember the hazy afternoon. The backyard with the sloping green lawn edged by a huge rhododendron bush. The sticky heat. The hot sun. The smell of smoke and the marinated beef sizzling on the grill in the deck off the swimming pool. The smoke hung in the warm afternoon air, mingling with the sound of us kids running around barefoot and frolicking and screaming in the swimming pool.
Everyone was there, everyone who would form our loosely connected American family. Us and Uncle Shin’s family. There also was Auntie Minnie, a distant relative from Daddy’s side, her husband, Uncle Wilson, and their eight-year-old son, Jason Wilson. By then, Uncle Wilson, a sleepy-eyed, scrawny, electric-pole-tall twenty-one-year-old GI with a towering Afro in their wedding pictures from more than a decade before, had become huge, at least it seemed to us, having steadily spread sideways since his GI days. He was a subway conductor with the appropriate voice that boomed like a blaring trumpet. Inah immediately took a shine to him that day, for the pure novelty of him being the only real American among us, and to girl-pretty Jason Wilson latching on to them like a leech.
Inah shimmi
ed around Uncle Wilson, getting a ride on his shoulder, heh-hehing. And when she climbed onto the tongue-shaped blue rubber float, lying flat on her stomach bloated with the Coca-Cola she’d downed all afternoon from a tall cylindrical plastic glass, Inah, without knowing how to speak English, somehow enlisted Jason to push the float for her from behind while she arm-paddled around the pool. Squealing with delight and shouting, “Oh-kay, Oh-kay,” and dodging Cousin Ki-hong and Cousin Ki-sunthey spoke funny, chopped-off Korean-who were playing treasure-hunting divers wearing Day-Glo goggles and black rubber flippers.
In a picture taken that day, all the children, a motley crew of nine, are gathered in the front row. Blue-lipped and teeth chattering, Inah, in an orange-and-yellow-swirl two-piece swimsuit, has squeezed herself next to Jason Wilson. She’s wearing white-rimmed plastic sunglasses, far too large for her face, and a big toothy grin. Next to her, Jason stands, looking squashed, his smooth, olive-skinned face solemn and serious. Behind her, Uncle Wilson towers like a big oak tree. His two big hands are placed on Inah’s shoulders to stop her from fidgeting. And next to Jason stand Uncle Shin’s two sons, Cousin Ki-hong and Cousin Ki-sun, in wet swim trunks sticking around their legs. And then finally me, in shorts and a tank top, squinty and looking confused, barely making it into the frame.
That’s what I mostly remember about our very first summer in America: being confused and disoriented. Maybe it was only natural, having been suddenly yanked away from familiar surroundings. Maybe it had to do with the fact that it was summer and we were yet to start school. Hot and sunny days went by, loosely strung together in a shapeless medley, and I felt haunted with this sensation of slowly floating toward nowhere, which of course I couldn’t even begin to articulate. I remember, though, constantly asking Dad or Mom where we were and where we were going, like someone who had suddenly lost all sense of direction.