by Mia Yun
“Oh? From Indonesia?” says Daddy, giving it another look over.
“Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? You can have it for five bucks.”
“Oh?!” I say. “More expensive than the books?”
“Of course, it comes all the way from Indonesia. And I think it’s old.” Daddy asks me what I am going to do with it. Do you really want that? I am not so sure. Daddy peels out a five dollar bill and hands it to the lady, and I am already regretting it. But the lady says enjoy it. I carry the carved driftwood, and Inah, the old mildewed books. So very happy, Inah skips and dances. Daddy says it takes so little for her to be happy.
“Are you that happy to have the books?” Daddy asks Inah.
“Yes, Daddy,” she says in her singsong voice.
When we get home, Inah torpedoes through the door and runs straight to the kitchen to show the books to Mom, who says but they have mildew all over. Inah says, it’s okay: She needs them because she’s going to become a botanist when she grows up. That’s news. What has happened to the astronaut? And I am not even sure what a botanist does.
“But you go to Harvard first,” Mom says.
I wash the driftwood in the bathroom sink and put it out to dry in the backyard against the wall. After dinner, sneezing and sniffling and rubbing her red itchy-eyes, Inah spends hours looking at the books, turning the mildewed, yellowed pages that are stuck together. In the book about trees “worth knowing,” she reads all about the trees after which the streets in our new neighborhood are named. She says ashes, maples and elms are deciduous trees that bear winged seeds, and that magnolias, dogwoods and hollies are fruit-bearing trees, and are known for their showy flowers. Does she know what deciduous means? I bet she doesn’t. Well, I don’t know either. But what Inah likes most in the books are the color illustrations of wildflowers and their names: New Jersey Tea, Indian Pipe, Ghost Flower, Indigo Broom, Shooting Star, Poor Man’s Weather-glass and Gold-thread.
“When I become a botanist,” Inah says out loud, “I am going to discover wildflowers and give them names like Blue Tangles, Red Flute, and Snow Shoot.”
“You have to discover the flowers first before you can give them names,” I say.
“But I know already what Blue Tangles look like. Like blue satin ribbons you put on a gift box!”
THREE
The early morning train pulls out of the dank termini, and memories of Venice recede like a low tide into the back of my sloshing mind. And the details of my old life that have stayed in the background—blurry and abstract, like so many smudged watermarks on rice paper—rush in and demand my attention. I feel anxious, as though emerging from a long amnesia.
Picking up speed, the train lurches on, simulating the movement of water, and I fall asleep. When I wake up, Inah is still poring over the beat-up guidebook with her legs pulled up like a tent on the seat across. Next to her, her spiraled notebook is lying open, the entire page filled with a long list of must-sees in Florence. It puts me in an inexplicably bad mood.
Groggy and shivering—as if I am still in damp clothes—I watch Inah, her engrossed, expressionless face, her straight black hair falling over it. It still puzzles me. The way we have turned out. The way Inah has turned out. Whatever happened to the Inah who used to flit about the Bowne Street apartment in the morning in her favorite flint-balled, shrunken and threadbare Betty Boop pajamas she wouldn’t part with? Relentlessly upbeat. I still remember the giggly and hushed and breathless falsetto voice she used to use when, at bedtime, lying in our narrow bunk beds Cousin Ki-hong and Cousin Ki-sun generously bequeathed to us, we whisper-talked in the dark.
Inah had just discovered that she could make up anything in her head. “Let’s pretend we live on the beach in California,” she used to say, her Tinkerbell voice ringing with such a thrill. And that very instant, together, we would leave behind our small Bowne Street apartment and fly to some far-off places, away from crowded Flushing, bulging with people from all over the world. To the Real America we’d glimpse on TV. For we knew (even though Dad would tell us that Flushing was where miracles happened every day), Flushing was not real America. That, just as Uncle Shin said, it was just a temporary holding pen of immigrants like us, a stopover place on the way to the Real America. If we stayed too long, we would get stuck here forever to become Flushing ghosts.
And there we were in an instant. On the sugar-white beach (in California) where seagulls fly, spitting out throaty, noisy cries. Inah walking a fluffy-eared brown dog she pretended (just because she could) was hers. The dog had a real American name like Margie or Max, and she/he knew just how to catch a star-spangled Frisbee every time she sent it flying in a perfect arc. (These pictures she drew were at once vivid but fuzzy and blurry at the outer edges, from her lack of experience.)
I blankly stare out the train window at the grass fields flecked with red poppies, freshly tilled brown land, and blue-green hills flying past in splashes of bottle green, ruby red and myrtle brown. Inah finally looks up.
“Listen to this,” she says. With her wet thumb, Inah rapidly flips back the pages of the guidebook. “Visiting the magnificent Chiesa di Santa Croce, the French writer Stendhal experienced this overwhelming sensation which left him unable to walk for days…. It’s called ‘Stendhalismo’ or ‘Stendhal’s Disease,’ and symptoms include sweating and giddy faintness. It’s said that Florentine doctors treat up to twelve cases a year.”
Well?!
My bad mood persists, and I feel almost paralyzed with inertia when we walk out of the Santa Maria Novella station into the blazing Florentine afternoon. The sudden blast of sunlight is unnerving. And just like that, I know I will hate it in Florence.
Inah uncertainly looks out into the big mad swirl of traffic circling the station and consults her map, turning it around this way and that. Finally, she concludes that it should take us no more than ten minutes to get to our hotel. Of course, she means by foot. But I am in no mood to drag Mom’s suitcase around in the stifling heat.
“Well, you are the boss,” I say instead.
“You are in a good mood,” she mutters. “Anything the matter?”
“No, Inah,” I say. “Everything’s real swell.” Sighing audibly, Inah grabs the strap to Mom’s hideous suitcase and redistributes the weight of her tubelike, dirt-slicked backpack.
“We better cross the street here,” she says. “Otherwise, we’ll have to walk all the way down and back up.”
“I don’t see any sign of a crosswalk,” I say. Inah goes ahead anyway, hurling the suitcase over the guardrail. She then squeezes herself through the space between the rails, obviously placed there to prevent just that: pedestrian crossing. She stands dangerously close to the passing cars.
“Come on,” Inah hollers to me because I am still dawdling behind the rail. Then, seeing a lull in the traffic, she dashes across the street, dragging the suitcase behind her. Just then I see a tiny green Fiat speed around the circle. It’s obvious that Inah doesn’t see it because of the blind spot the sunlight creates. The Fiat speeds up and comes to a loud screeching halt. It all happens in a matter of a split second. I am in a sudden blackout. In my head, I hear the echo of a silent scream. It’s all so sickeningly familiar; the sudden suspension of time, blurred vision, slowed-down motions, the horrible dread and the slow crash landing to reality that follows. My heart thumps so loudly that it feels like it’s going to explode out of my chest.
I force myself to look up. The Fiat has come to a stop after nearly sideswiping Inah. And Inah stands in the middle of the road next to the Fiat, as if frozen. But looking more disoriented than frightened. And then I see the head of the driver of the Fiat poke out the window. Gesticulating wildly with his hands, he starts spitting out infectious streams of curses at Inah. Stunned, she stands mum, docilely taking the shower of verbal abuse. Enraged, I squeeze myself through the rails and dash toward the middle of the road where Inah’s standing mute and frozen. I hear myself screaming at the Fiat driver. In English and in Korean. He
has no idea what I am saying. His head jerks toward me, but even this close, all I can make out is his dark, curly hair and his face shaped like a sledgehammer. Cars honk wildly. And in the periphery of my vision, I can see a crowd gathered on the sidewalk, gawking.
Suddenly, as if woken up from a sleepwalk, mortified and petrified, Inah pulls me by the arm. “Yunah! Come on, let’s just go,” she says. “It’s my fault.”
“I don’t care whose fault it is. You’re not a damn doormat, Inah!” I hiss, shaking off her hand. “Goddamn speak up and defend yourself. You don’t deserve his tirade.”
“But you’re causing a scene!” Inah says. “People are staring. You’re not in New York, you know.” Dragging Mom’s suitcase, she steers me up to the sidewalk.
“So what!” I yell. “What are you so afraid of? Let them stare. I don’t give a damn. I don’t believe in enduring, overcoming and suppressing like you and Mom. Do you know how many Koreans die of han, from suppressed regret and anger?” Inah stares at me like I am nuts. Bewildered by my outburst. So out of proportion. I feel like giving a good swift kick at Mom’s suitcase sitting there on the sidewalk. I really can’t believe how ugly it is. It seems to represent everything that’s wrong with my life.
“Can we go now?” Inah asks, exasperated.
“I hope next time I try to defend you, you either side with me or just shut up.”
“I hope you wait until I ask next time,” she says, looking surly and thoroughly fed up.
“Oh, forget it. Why should I expect you to be loyal!”
“How does it have anything to do with being loyal?”
“Just shut up and tell me where to go. It was your fault anyway.”
“Bitch,” Inah grumbles.
“Butch,” I hiss, and speed down the street, feeling ugly with anger, fighting the crowd clogging the narrow sidewalk and sopping with sweat. I hate everything. Inah. The heat. The crowd. And I don’t need any convincing: The Italian sun is poisonous. It can kill.
Of course, we end up lugging the suitcase and backpacks all over, circling and back and forth across the same piazzas before finding our hotel. So much for “Stendhal’s Disease.”
FOUR
Inah’s bent over at the foyer, fussing over her sneaker laces. Daddy’s looking up at the sky, holding the door open for her. “Now all ready, Daddy!” Inah says, unfurling herself like a plant, and together we run down the steps to the sidewalk, smudged dark from the early shower. Daddy comes down, stops and sniffs the wet air. “Ah! Isn’t it so nice out?” he says. We giggle, and Daddy’s dark face, old as long as we remember and as familiar as the face of a penny, blooms in a sad kind of happiness.
Inah and I greedily present our hands for him to take, and off we go for our after-dinner walk. Daddy, in his favorite white Sperry Top-Sider canvas shoes and a brown jamba, jumper, that Mom says makes him look like an old Korean grandpa. Down the wet sidewalk, dizzily strewn with cherry blossom petals felled by the shower. With Daddy in the middle, like a tall, skinny tree.
In Inah’s arm, Mom’s fancy black meshed nylon bag from Korea dangles like an empty fishnet. It’s got two shiny black plastic rings for handles, and Inah, the future botanist, calls it her “botanizing bag.” In it, she carries home tree leaves and flower petals and whatnot and presses them in the pages of Webster’s Dictionary. When they are all pressed nicely, flat and delicately brittle, she pastes them in her sketchbook with Scotch tape or Krazy Glue and writes down all the botanical facts about them in the margins, copying from The Little Nature Library and Webster’s Dictionary. Her favorite so far is a whole dandelion she pulled up from the sidewalk outside our house one day; its spiky leaves and yellow flowers and roots and all. Later, she glued it to a sketchbook page and taped it on the bathroom door upstairs.
DANDELION FACTS
(ACCORDING TO WILDFLOWERS WORTH KNOWING)
A/K/A: Blowball, Lion’s-tooth or Peasant’s Clock
Distribution: around the civilized world!
From a poem on dandelion: “Dear common flower that grow’st beside the way / Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold …”
We follow the thick tangled green wall of tall forsythia shrub and turn to Magnolia Place. There, the shrub breaks briefly into a narrow opening where a winding redbrick path runs to the door of the kitchen of an old gable-roofed house. Inah and I call it “the Chinese house,” because from Ash Avenue, we see yellowed and rain-stained Chinese newspaper placed behind the broken pane in the upstairs window. But we have yet to see anyone who might live there.
Curious, as we always are, Inah and I stop and peek at the back of the house, a dark shingled hulk sitting in a spooky hush, veiled in the evening mist and grizzled with the shadows of tall pines with droopy, scraggly branches. The ground around is thickly padded with pine needles, and above the kitchen door, from a naked lightbulb, yellow light burns feebly, sputtering a misty halo around it, and we can almost hear it hum.
“Daddy, who lives in the house?” Inah asks. “How come we never see anyone?”
“Hmmm … ,” Daddy says, stroking his chin. “It looks like a haunted house, doesn’t it?” Shuddering, Inah quickly pulls back her head and runs down the sidewalk, flinging her “botanizing” bag, pretending she’s scared to death. She then trips and falls but gets up right away. “I am OK, Daddy,” says Inah, rubbing her scraped palm to her legs.
“Ha, Inah, be more careful. Daddy likes everything about you, except you should try to be more thoughtful and calm.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she says.
On Beech, we turn and head down the street. The forsythias and magnolias have already bloomed and dipped, and trees are getting thicker every day. In the pale streetlights, dogwoods and cherries in bloom look blurry and iridescent, as if covered with wet snow, and the warm, damp air drips with faint scents of the flowers. Inah and I expect at any minute Daddy will drink the air and say how it’s hard to believe we’re only five minutes away from the dirty and crowded and noisy Main Street and how it’s almost like the country. And, of course, Inah is all ready to say, never missing a beat, “Quite contrary!” Daddy then will laugh, pushing his head back, “Hah, hah, hah.”
We also know that at the corner of Cherry, we will pass the Chinese Buddhist temple: a shabby, weather-worn, old wooden house, where, up the rickety wooden steps, outside the door, sun-bleached red plastic lanterns that, in rain, look like overripened tropical fruit ready to fall, hang like full red moons at night. There we’ll hold on to Daddy’s arms, rippling with lean muscles, and peer through the picture window to take a look at the huge golden Buddha, with his placid face and thin, wispy curlicue of a mustache and red lips, sitting aglow in a lotus position inside the smoky living room. Looking a little too cramped: The tip of his cone-shaped head almost touches the white plaster of the low ceiling.
We will then walk as far as Quince, up Oak (another nut-bearing tree) and then down Poplar (water-loving trees like willows) before turning back. Past houses with hanging pots of geraniums and petunias, and small front lawns, where a faded pink plastic hula hoop or a child’s tricycle with streamers patiently endures its temporary abandonment in the lingering light of the dusk.
And then, gradually, adrift in a dreamlike world, we will forget everything, and instead, it will be the mysterious and undefinable swelling and lulling night world, full of muffled voices, faraway sounds of barking dogs, soft echoes of doors opening and closing, that will have our full attention. Flanking Daddy, Inah and I will float through the night streets, our feet on automatic pilot, fascinated by the way the plain, somber-looking houses that we pass without ever noticing during the day go through nocturnal transformation: each house, like a plant that folds inward at sundown, shutting itself in, creating an island with its own rhythms and rituals and mysteries. Offering its softly glowing windows to the world like movie screens where people soundlessly move about like shadows and televisions flicker endlessly.
But the glimpses of intangible America we get only in
fleeting doses will never quite satisfy us but only convince us that people in those houses are different from us. That, unlike us, they are “real” Americans.
“Daddy, is it true Americans eat steak every night for dinner?” Unable to articulate the puzzle, Inah, as though waking up from a dream, will ask a stupid question like that. But Dad will know what she means and explain to her and to me, too, how people are the same everywhere: how they get hungry just like us when they don’t eat; how they are sometimes happy, sometimes sad; how they fight, make up and fight again; and how they all want to be happy. Just like us.
In the afternoon, though, walking home from school, we hardly remember to give a second look at these same houses, now sitting hushed, unambiguously lacking in character. But Ash Avenue always manages to surprise us a little. The way it waits for us, empty and quiet and looking strangely vulnerable in the afternoon light, showing all of its shabby walls and old paint jobs, and patched-up roofs and untrimmed hedges in its worn-out nirvana. (By Ash Avenue, we mean just the short shabby stretch where our house stands with six others. Across Parsons, Ash continues on, but we hardly ever go there.)
Ash Avenue hosts very few kids. Now and then, the chubby Korean girl who lives on Beech comes around, walking her yapping Pomeranian on a white studded leather leash. Her name is Jin-joo, which means “pearl” in Korean. But she’s stuck-up. Whenever we try to pet her dog, Sparkle Plenty, she says he is going to bite us, so be careful. Now, Inah just snubs her.