by Mia Yun
TEN
When I wake up in the morning, Inah is already packed and sitting by the naked, gray window, lost in thought, her diary open facedown on her lap, like bird wings. I pack quickly and take a shower.
“So are we calling Mom and Dad?” Inah says as I put on my clothes. Every time I’ve asked her, she has answered it with the garden variety of “not in the mood,” “not now,” or “later.” I have given up.
“If you want to,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant. I look at my watch on the night table. It’s past one in the morning in New York, but I know Mom won’t mind. She has probably been waiting by the phone every day.
Mom’s voice answering the phone is thick with sleep, but she vehemently denies that I woke her up. Dad went fishing with Uncle Shin in the morning, she says, as if letting me in on a secret. Thankfully, she doesn’t grill me on why we haven’t called until now. I talk to her briefly, then hand the phone to Inah and slip into my sandals. I don’t feel much like listening in on their conversation. Mom and Inah have always had that special something between them. That tense and tangled bond I was and will never be a part of.
“Don’t forget what I said about the kimchi,” I whisper to Inah, and she impatiently waves me away. I walk out of the room, shutting the door carefully not to make too much noise.
It is drizzling outside. The narrow lane, strewn with rain-fallen leaves, looks even shabbier this morning: The gray brick walls are listing, soft and swollen with rainwater and soggy paper boxes lie around with bloated cat food still in them. On Lista di Spagna, a man sits on a soaked piece of cardboard, holding up a tiny, shaggy, wet, black puppy on the palm of his outstretched hand toward passersby as if it were a precious offering. It’s much too early; the cliniclike store where we’ve been stopping by every afternoon to get bottled water and occasionally Parmalat milk is yet to open.
It’s strange how quickly one gets used to a place. (And yet, it feels like ages ago, the sunny afternoon I followed unhappy Inah up the Lista di Spagna and through the leafy lane to our pensione.) It makes me a little sad to think that German tourists will still be sitting around the same flimsy white tables outside the tiny beer hall off the Scalzi, looking out at the drizzle just as they did every afternoon when we returned to our pensione, tired in soggy clothes. That it will be other tourists who will cross the same small courtyard of our pensione, open the same creaky, semicircular wooden door into the same dim-lit lobby. That they will be handed the same key attached to the heavy, pear-shaped bronze knocker by the same old lady, whose powdered, bone-pale face, emphasized by a great, masculine, aquiline nose and dull orange hair severely swept up into a stiff helmet of a pompadour I will never forget. And then for several days, every afternoon, resting on the same impossibly high Venetian bed, they will hear, as we heard, the gondoliers sing on the canal, in clear, high-pitched, and lush voices, like those of certain birds. Their songs will travel across the water, the Lista di Spagna and the lane and reach them, as they reached us, in distant, yet clear, echoes as though from a dreamland. And how sad that no one will ever remember our brief presence here.
I cross the street and walk out to the edge of the canal by the pink Hotel Principe. The water is murky, gray and listless. The buildings across all have lights on with the windows lit in warm orange glows like rectangular moons of August. In one of them, a woman is walking about with what looks like a water jug in her hand. A battered green motorboat heads up the canal, carrying a man and a wet, gray-haired dog, and an old couch, a TV and chairs, half-covered with a blue tarpaulin. They are moving in the rain.
Then a vaporetto chugs down. Looking sluggish. It is crowded with people going to work. From the crowd, my eye instantly picks out a man in a beautiful dark blue suit standing behind the railing. He carries a long black umbrella and a brown leather briefcase in his hands. He is very elegant. Like an actor. Immediately, I think to myself: a man at home. There is that beauty about him-that intangible and yet immutable beauty that grows around only such a man. The kind that stems from a life lived in continuity, rootedness and rituals. A proud, self-assured sort of beauty you find in an ancient tree standing on terra firma.
After the vaporetto is gone, taking him with it, leaving a churning trail of waves behind, I stand there awash with pangs of envy. I just know Dad would have liked to have lived such a life. In Korea. Instead, he has been living the life of a transplanted tree, only half-rooted at best in a mutually rejecting foreign soil.
When I come back to the room, Inah is getting dressed. Her hair is wet from the shower. I can tell she has been crying. Her scarred face is blotched, and there are wads of dark clouds hovering about her. I take her soggy sneakers and put them out on the windowsill, knowing they will never have a chance to dry before we leave. I then hand her my spare pair of sandals. Inah takes them without protest and slides her feet in. She doesn’t say anything about Mom or the phone call.
PART THREE
ONE
Daddy hates our Bowne Street apartment. He calls it a box in the sky. He says it’s unnatural for people to be living so far off the ground. Stacked on top of one another like chickens in cages, waiting to be sold at a marketplace. Maybe he says these things because he misses Korea. He’s always telling us stories about him growing up in the coun-try: pulling out a radish from the dark brown dirt and eating it right there, sinking his teeth in; how fragrant it smelled, like earth itself and how sweet and juicy it was; or walking miles through pouring rain to his country school, wading across streams and up and down the muddy mountain paths with the smell of rain and earth and grass and trees all about him. Inah and I cock our heads when Daddy talks about these things.
That’s why we move to Ash Avenue. Because Daddy, whom Mom calls “the poet,” hates living in the apartment and misses living in a house with the smell of living and breathing soil. But we are moving only ten minutes’ walk away. Nonetheless Inah is excited. Every morning, she checks the wall calendar hanging on the bathroom door where Daddy marked our moving date by drawing a five-pointed star with a blue Magic Marker.
On that morning we get up so early that it is still dark outside. The streetlamps are still fluttering on feebly, like fading moons, and most of the apartments across the street have dark windows. In her shrunken Betty Boop pajamas and splayed hair, Inah flits about the apartment like a spring swallow, tripping over the piles of boxes. Mom yells at her for getting in the way, but she doesn’t care. Then Daddy steps on a thumbtack on the floor and Auntie Minnie has to come and drive him to Flushing Hospital for a tetanus shot. He comes home limping a little. Mom’s all frustrated.
Later, in Auntie Minnie’s car, we follow Daddy and the graffiti-ridden moving truck he’s riding in. When the car turns off Kissena Boulevard onto Ash Avenue, Inah drapes herself on my back like a lizard, trying to look out my side of the window where a neat row of identical-looking houses slip by. Boxy, and white and cream-colored, standing shoulder to shoulder, they look as if made from cake icing.
But soon the block of neat row houses ends, and from its right side Ash Avenue bleeds away into an oval circle of Syringa Place and Magnolia Place. After that, the street turns noticeably shabby. Lining either side, flush on the narrow sidewalks, detached from one another, stands a hodgepodge of old and dilapidated houses, looking weary, like disgruntled stragglers who wandered in and, too tired to move, decided to stake a claim there. That’s what Auntie Minnie says.
Just then, up ahead, the moving truck pulls up at the curb, and we hear a loud belch. Auntie Minnie turns to Mom and says, “Is that it?!” She sounds disappointed. We eagerly follow Auntie Minnie’s finger pointing to a tiny stone house.
Little do we know then that it will be the only house we will ever live in before we leave home. That we will stay put here while other Korean families we know move away over the years to rich suburbs in Long Island and Westchester and New Jersey. That we will never leave Flushing, not in any true sense. That Flushing will become our American hometown.
> Inah and I stare out the window at the demure stone house dwarfed between a ramshackle clapboard and a rambling gable-roofed dark brown Victorian. It wears a sun-bleached green asphalt-tiled roof and hangs a palm-sized porch like an apron pocket in the front. There is no driveway or garage. Just a short, cracked cement path running to the porch from the sidewalk. It looks just like a camping lodge.
The cab door of the truck opens, Daddy climbs down and waves to us. Instantly recovering from the disappointment, Inah and I stumble out of the car and run up the steps to the porch and file inside after him. The house is stuffy and smells like mildew. Inah shoots up the hallway and runs up the steps, shaking the walls with her thumping feet. We go around, opening every door and peeping into the empty, gloomy-looking rooms. In the upstairs hallway, Inah pulls off cracked sheets of paint from the wall and flings them to the floor. Mouths open, we stare up at the ceiling where water stains spread in spiderwebs, as if deciphering puzzles. In the bathroom, taking turns, we yank at the chain; water roars down, making the walls shiver, and tumbles into the toilet bowl with a thick brown water ring and disappears.
“We live in Flushing, flushing the toilet,” Inah says, and we laugh.
When we go down into the kitchen, Mom and Auntie Minnie are inspecting the cupboards. “Hallelujah,” Auntie Minnie whoops sarcastically, shrinking back from the mouse droppings she finds under the sink. Through the open kitchen door, we can see Daddy walking around the scrubby backyard, where grass is ankle-deep.
“Whoever lived here was a stranger to cleaning,” Mom says. “Look at this, too.” With the toe of her foot, Mom scrapes at the burn marks on the bubbly linoleum floor, and sighs. “It will take years to clean up and fix things.”
Daddy walks in through the kitchen door from the backyard and asks us how we like the house. “Don’t you think it beats living in the box in the sky?”
“Amen!” Auntie Minnie says in her thunderlike voice. Mom just sighs and sighs. Inah tells Daddy that Mom is not so happy. Your mother’s got the Flushing blues, that’s all, he says.
After Auntie Minnie leaves to get back to her salon, Inah and I make ourselves comfortable on the couch in the middle of the tiny living room, surrounded with mountains of boxes, and eat potato chips from a bag. Munching, Inah says, “Salty, salty, naughty, naughty.” It is cold and her teeth are chattering but she goes on, “Salty, salty, naughty, naughty.”
TWO
“Isn’t it good to live in a house instead of in that little box in the sky?” Daddy is standing on a wobbly ladder, hammering a nail on the wall. We stand below him, steadying the ladder and holding up a tray of nails and hooks for him. It’s about the hundredth time he has asked the question, and Inah and I nod our heads. A little puzzled. “And we have a backyard now! How about that?!” But we know that the backyard is just a sorry-looking scuffed lawn with a weather-beaten wooden fence listing sideways as if from years of exhaustion.
“I know it’s not much of a backyard now. But just wait and see. Your dad is going to turn it into a beautiful Korean Zen garden!” We don’t know what a Korean Zen garden should look like, though.
On the weekend, with Daddy, we go to paint stores and hardware stores, where he stocks up on gallons of paint and garden tools; a shovel and a rake, garden gloves and rubber boots, a wheelbarrow and a sieve, a tin watering can and a green rubber water hose, coiled like a snake.
The weekend Daddy paints our room in Robin Blue and the kitchen in Egg Yellow, rollers and pans are lying all over the floor, which is covered with plastic sheets. Whenever Daddy takes a cigarette break, we tail him out to the backyard like midget bodyguards, blowing out huge pink balloons with our wads of Bazooka bubble gum. Daddy, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and covered with millions of yellow and blue dots of paint from head to toe, walks around and around in a warped circle, his arms behind his back, squinting his eyes and tapping the ground with his feet. Like a geomancer!
In the afternoon, Uncle Shin stops by with a cold Miller six-pack, which they take out to the backyard and drink standing side by side with the grass up to their shins. Daddy tells Uncle Shin how he is going to get rid of the lawn and the brick barbeque pit by the white birch and build a beautiful Korean Zen garden. Uncle Shin, an American expert, says no, no, leave the lawn alone. Just replace it with new sod. You can’t be a home owner in America without a lawn to mow. Daddy says it’s one of the dumb things Americans do. The trouble they go through to keep their lawns manicured! Moreover, lawn mowers pollute the air. Uncle Shin shakes his head and tells us your father will never become an American. Uncle Shin and Daddy stand in the spring afternoon sunlight and laugh, shaking their heads. From the beer, their faces are the color of a ripe plum.
The April sky is spotlessly blue, and the sun is shining. Daddy’s boots and pant legs are all caked with mud. Half of the lawn is already all ripped up, and every time Daddy sinks the sharp blade of his shiny new shovel to the ground, yellow dust rises and joins the cloud of dust hanging in the air in a long, trailing swath of yellow. It’s a carnival for Inah. In her shiny, buttercup yellow rubber boots, she drags the tall rake around behind her, singing like a broken record, “‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row.’” Once in a while, Daddy stops, wipes his forehead and leans over the handle of the shovel and sniffs at the air. “Ah! Nice!” he says, smiling and closing his eyes. “What’s so nice, Daddy?” Inah asks. “Why, the smell of dirt!” “Oh!” As Mom says, Daddy is a funny man.
Mom sticks her head out the kitchen window and says it looks like a storm has passed through the backyard. Come in, lunch is ready. We hose down Daddy’s dirt-caked arms and hands and his rubber boots and pelt him with the hand towel he wears around his neck, to shake loose the dust on his clothes. We leave our muddy boots outside and file in, and Mommy says we look like street urchins. We have spicy noodles and, after that, slices of apple.
The sun has shifted, and it’s cold in the shade when we go back out. Daddy sets up a sieve on four wooden pegs, and we walk among the clumps of dirt lying around wearing bits of grass on them like so many severed heads. After Daddy finishes sieving the first batch of soil, we load the stones in a wheelbarrow and dump them along the foot of the listing fence. It’s a lot of fun. And we are the world’s best little helpers, that’s what Daddy says, fishing out the mini spiral notebook he carries in his shirt pocket and the pencil stub he carries behind his ear. Inah peeks at the notebook, where he is busy jotting down notes, and wants to know what’s that he’s writing down.
“Oh, some new ideas about the garden. Daddy’s going to plant bamboo trees there,” he says, pointing to the ground by the listing fence. “And Korean tree peonies here.”
“That’s all, Daddy?”
“That’s all? That’s plenty! In a Zen garden, the empty space should be the focus.” Inah and I stare at him, perplexed. Daddy squats down and draws an S-shaped line on the ground with his nicotine-yellowed forefinger. “See this? An unbroken empty space flowing, what does that remind you of? A river! That’s what it will look like in the moonlight. A white river. Wouldn’t that be beautiful! A white river flowing around the patches of flowers and bamboo groves!”
But they don’t sell any Korean tree peonies at the garden centers we visit. They don’t have any books on Korean tree peonies at the public library on Main Street, either. So we bring home books on flowers and plants and gardening. Sitting at the kitchen table, Inah thumbs through the books and asks Daddy if we could have dahlias, or hyacinths, or gladioluses or cannas. And a little pond, too, with water lilies and lotuses. And goldfish in it. But Daddy says it will be really nice to have wisterias. Hanging wisteria blooms, so beautiful. And they give a nice cool shade in the summer. Mom clucks her tongue and says if people overheard us talking, they would think we have a huge yard. Daddy laughs and tells Mom to wait and see. It’s going to be beautiful when it’s done. Mom says Daddy has to be the happiest man in
Flushing with his scrubby little backyard and his dream of a Korean Zen garden.
On Sunday, while Mom is belching hymns and praying to God at the Siloam Reformed Church of New York, Daddy and Inah and I walk all the way to the Queens Botanical Garden. It’s the wedding season. Everywhere at the garden we see newly married couples: Koreans, Chinese, Indians and Hispanics; brides in white or ivory wedding gowns with trellises and bouquets, and grooms in black tuxedos and new haircuts. They are trailed by tripping cameramen, sweating and lugging videos and cameras, and their families and friends and guests and bridesmaids, in flowing saris and matching satin dresses that swish and dance at their feet. While Daddy and Inah walk around looking at the plants and flowers, I park myself outside the rose garden and watch newly married couples pose for the cameras at the arch of the white gazebo, all lovey-dovey and doe-eyed and bursting with smiles. Their teeth are dazzling white pearls in the sunlight.
The next Sunday, on the way back from the Japanese garden, we pass a winding-down garage sale on Quince Avenue. Inah moseys over and picks up a couple of old mildewed books sitting on the sun-splashed lawn. It’s a two-volume set called The Little Nature Library: Dedicated to the Glory of the Outdoors. (Volume one is about wildflow-ers: Wildflowers Worth Knowing, and Volume two is about trees: Trees Worth Knowing.) There are lots of color illustrations in them. Inah asks Daddy to get them for her. Please Daddy, she says, cradling the mildewed books in her arms. The old lady with a silver doughnut-shaped bun tells Daddy it’s only one dollar each. Practically free. She could have cut out the illustrations and sold each easily for a buck, but she wouldn’t ruin good books like that. Daddy counts out two bucks from his wallet and pays the lady. Oh, then, I want to get something too. I notice a V-shaped piece of driftwood sticking out of a cardboard box. I pull it up and show it to Daddy. It’s carved with bulging bird eyes and wings and covered with a cobweb. Daddy looks at it, turning it this way and that. It looks scary, Inah says. The old lady says it’s from Indonesia.