by Mia Yun
That leaves the kids who live in the low-slung ranch house on Syringa Place, across from “the Chinese house” on Magnolia. Every afternoon, behind their low, undulating, gray wall, trimmed white at the top, the three brothers play hoops, their bowl-cut blond hair flying, or ride their mountain bikes around the oval circle. They don’t ever talk to us or say hello, but they zip past real close on their bikes as if they are following an invisible track, and when we squeal, they make faces. On weekends, their blond-haired father, in khaki shorts and T-shirts and bare feet, washes down their old car outside. He doesn’t ever say hello to us either.
Many an afternoon, bored stiff, Inah and I aimlessly walk around the deserted streets. Inah, carrying her “botanizing” bag, and I, carrying nothing but my feet. Inah muttering and yakking like a loony bird and saying things like, “Aw, dang,” “Gosh,” “Shucks,” “Aw, jeez,” and “O damn,” just to see how they sound out of her own eleven-year-old mouth. (She picks them up from boys at school.) We walk to Parsons and peek through the black iron gate of the Nichiren Shoshu Temple, the most mysterious of all the houses of worship in our neighborhood that is full of them; five churches and three Buddhist temples, and other kinds we don’t know anything about. We stare at the white building at the end of a winding stone path bordered by lawn. With black glass slits for windows (which makes it impossible to look in—or out, for that matter), it’s as though a spaceship has landed. (We wonder why, of all places, in Flushing, Queens.)
But it, too, gets boring, and we wander off again. More often than not, the only person we come across is the Chinese grandma out hunting for mugwort, which grows in the shrubs and bushes. She’s carrying the same old tattered blue canvas bag with a pink daisy appliquéd on it, and is wearing the same black cloth shoes, gray men’s pants and a flower-printed blouse. She smiles at us and says, “Hoa, hoa,“ and her face blooms with wrinkles that crisscross her face like intricate lacework. We feel sorry for her that she has to go around looking for mugwort.
But come Sunday, Ash Avenue turns into a thoroughfare, overflowing with church-goers, temple-goers and mosque-goers, from all the houses of worship in our neighborhood. All day long, the narrow sidewalks are crammed with families with children in tow; silver-haired and white-robed Muslim men with embroidered caps on their heads (Inah says they are Pakistanis, but what does she know?); Korean grandmas in hanbok, carrying golden-edged hymnbooks and red-edged Bibles; and gaggles of kids from Sunday schools playing tag up and down the street as if, Mom says, they are in their own living rooms.
And still, not even a hint of life at “the Chinese house.” Then, one Saturday, on the way home from the store with a bottle of sesame oil for Mom, we see a rusty pair of gigantic scissors going snip, snip along the top of the tangled, tall forsythia hedge around the rambling “Chinese house.” And just the flat top of a head, where thick silver hair stands up like grass in the freshly mowed lawn. Inah and I crouch a little and poke our heads through an opening of the hedge to see who is behind it. A short old grandpa looks at us. He’s wearing cotton gloves with their palm sides painted red. It looks like his hands are bleeding badly.
“Do I know you?” he says, closing the scissor hands, which look like Alaskan king crab legs.
“No, but we live next door,” Inah says, pointing to our house. “That one.”
“Huh!” he says, as if that’s the most surprising thing he has ever heard for a long time. “You Chinese?”
“No, we are just Korean. And she’s my sister.”
“Oh?!” He looks at me and then at Inah.
“We’re twins,” Inah says.
“I can tell you’re twins,” he says.
“Really?” Inah says happily.
“And you how old?”
“Eleven. But twelve in Korean age because in Korea when a baby is born, they say it’s a year old already.”
“Ha!” he says, looking at the scissors in his hands.
“Do you need our help, Grandpa?” asks Inah in her hopeful voice and points to the ground around him, strewn with leaves and snipped-off branches. “We can sweep them off for you.” I give her a quick shove, but she just ignores it. A sucker for a fast buck, she’s always rushing over to an old lady carrying a grocery bag or two on the street. She got a quarter only once, but she remains eternally hopeful. The Chinese grandpa considers Inah’s offer and says OK. I myself am not so sure, but Inah’s already walking around the hedge. She shuffles after the grandpa to the alley and helps him drag out two big plastic garbage cans. He hands us a tall broom and a short broom. We work fast. Like two little peasants out gathering firewood.
“Good, good,” the grandpa says after we help him fill up the two big black garbage bags. We tie them up, put them in the garbage cans, drag them and line them up at the Magnolia side entrance.
“Thank you, thank you,” he says to Inah, now standing expectantly with her arms at her sides. “You like come in?” he says, taking off the gloves. But we are not even supposed to go around talking to strangers, let alone following them into their houses. Although the grandpa doesn’t look scary at all. Still, I want to think it over just because the house looks so spooky and dark, but Inah blurts out yes. She knows the chance to get that buck is much better that way. Reluctantly, I shuffle after her and the grandpa through the back kitchen door. It is real dark and stuffy inside. All the windows are shut tight and drawn with venetian blinds, discolored to egg-yolk yellow. The musty hallway leading to the living room is cluttered with tall piles of Chinese newspapers tied up with strings and rickety stacks of cardboard boxes holding empty cans and jars. Several years later, Inah and I will read the novel Housekeeping and think of this very house.
“Come, come,” the grandpa says, picking his way through the clutter. Inah looks insanely happy. She’s almost shaking with excitement and trying hard not to squeal. We tiptoe after him into the living room, a little expectant. But it’s nothing like what we thought it would be. The living room sits quiet in grainy, diffused, dusty strips of sunlight pushing through the slats of the venetian blinds. It looks like an old movie set that hasn’t been dusted or disturbed for years.
It’s a while before we notice a narrow metal-framed cot standing against a wall. On it, under a crumpled blue sheet, a small lump rises. Oh, it’s an old lady’s head that lies on the bed where the blue sheet ends. It looks like someone has placed it there. Her face, shrunken small like a dried chestnut, is all bones and rigid and gray, like it’s molded out of gypsum. Her eyes are shut in two zippy lines and gummy in the corners. Her mouth has only traces of lips. On her forehead, her gray, coarse hair is arranged like a little girl’s bangs. It hasn’t been washed for a while. It looks all matted, like old, dirty wool. If it weren’t for the slow rising and falling of the sheet and the whizzing sound, like an asthmatic cat, coming from her chest, we would have thought she was dead.
“Is she your wife, Grandpa?” Inah asks boldly. The grandpa nods and looks at the grandma on the bed.
“She sick from old age,” he says. “Can’t no more go up and down the stairs.”
“How old is she?”
“Oh, old.” The grandma makes a sigh, as though telling us she has heard it.
“Do you have children?”
“One. Son. He no more child, though. He live far.”
“In California?”
“No, no. Not that far.” Inah and I feel very sorry for the grandma and the grandpa. In Korea, children take care of their parents when they get old. We don’t know if it’s the same in China. But we live in America. Still, we will surely take care of Mom and Dad when they get old. We won’t leave them all alone and sick in a big spooky house with a broken window and unmowed lawn. The grandpa waves his hand and points at the big brown corduroy couch. “Sit. Sit.” Right away, Inah saunters over and hops onto the couch, sending up a cloud of fine dust around her.
Suddenly, her eyes are shiny with greed. She has noticed the chess set sitting on the coffee table. She picks up one of
the ivory chess pieces and fingers it admiringly.
“You like?” Grandpa asks her, as if he finds that unusual. Inah nods and smiles. When she does this, the scar tissues, with paraffin-like sheen, pull the muscles in odd ways and make her look like an old, sly, wicked woman. Embarrassed for her, I look down at the floor, where a strip of pearly light slithers across my foot like a long, slow-moving snake. I move a bit, letting it fall back flat and straight on the floor. I know Inah’s going to hang around awhile. She has what Mom calls a “heavy butt.” I try to signal her, but she won’t meet my eye. I go over and sit down next to her, shoving her a little.
“I’m gonna go,” I say. “You coming?” Then I remember the sesame oil and ask her what she’s done with it. Inah’s eyes light up. She has left it out on the sidewalk in a bag. I get up. Inah puts down the chess piece and reluctantly gets up.
“Grandpa, we have to go home. Our mom’s waiting.”
“OK. You go out the back door.” I run out the kitchen door and around the corner to Ash. The sesame oil is still sitting there in the middle of the sidewalk in the brown paper bag, on the very spot Inah left it.
FIVE
During the summer, Ash Avenue acquires a Buddhist temple, Golden Lotus, and the Unification Church. Golden Lotus is the first one to open. In the redbrick Colonial house right across the street from us. On a drizzling morning, from our living-room window, Inah and I and tongue-clucking Mom spy on men hoisting up a sign—a fancy wooden board engraved with gold Chinese characters and red dragons—tied by ropes over the entrance of the house. Mom says, it’s a Chinese temple, as if that’s better than a Korean one.
Then a couple of weeks later, the Unification Church moves into the old rickety clapboard at the corner of Ash Avenue and Parsons Boulevard. One afternoon, Inah and I take orange Popsicles from the freezer and post ourselves across the street in stifling heat, a safe distance away, as we’re not supposed to go near it. (They might turn us into Moonies and make us go sell roses in restaurants.) Slurping and licking the fast-melting Popsicles, we watch an army of people sprucing up the house, crawling all over it like ants. The air buzzes and zings with the sounds of hammers and chain saws and a lawn mower.
“It’s very literary,” Inah says.
“What is?”
“The whole she-bang!” she says, hoping it sounds way cool. But to her huge disappointment, no one ever pays any attention to us. Getting bolder, each afternoon, we post ourselves a little closer, and then, finally, we cross the street and stand right outside the picket fence. The dingy, old, rickety house is now a picture-perfect, American dream house. With a fresh coat of snow white paint, the house and the picket fences are blinding to look at, and the zinging lawn mower has turned the weed-infested lawn into a mint green carpet. Now the rest of the houses on our block look even shabbier and more dilapidated.
Every time we sit down to dinner, Mom complains about the new Buddhist temple. All the people coming and going, day and night. And that smell of burning incense that lingers over the street “like a ghost.” Daddy jokes to us that they must have known Mom was a Christian. Don’t complain, he says. It could have been worse. Mom asks how. Well, imagine if it were a Christian church. Ha, ha. Mom says Buddhists are nothing but idol worshipers. Daddy says, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Buddhism is the gentlest of all religions. If only all other religions were as gentle as it. All it teaches is that life is suffering and illusion, and that happiness is achieved through a state of nothingness. How bad could that be?!
“So naive!” Mom says. But we wonder what a “state of nothingness” is.
“All right. If it bothers you that much,” Daddy says to Mom, winking at us, “we will move.”
“Why should we move?” she says. “Then they win!”
“See?” Daddy says to us. “You mom makes a bad example of a Christian. With her narrow-mindedness and intolerance. There’s nothing uglier than a religious turf war.”
“I just don’t want to be assaulted by the sight day and night,” Mom says.
“It’s the same thing. Why do you go to church, anyway?”
“I like sitting there in the church. I feel good. Peaceful.”
“But Daddy, why do people have religions?” Inah butts in.
“Why? Because they are lost and confused. Through religion, they hope to find contentment and peace of mind.”
“Oh?!!” A grain of rice falls out of Inah’s mouth. “You don’t have peace of mind, Daddy?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Mom tells Inah. “Do you think your father knows what he is talking about? He should have shaved his head and gone into the mountains a long time ago before he made a mess of things in this world.” Ha, ha, ha, Daddy laughs and says, “Your mom is a comedian.”
Instead of moving, Mom hangs heavy double drapery over the living-room window. I guess we will stick it out in Flushing. But Inah still dreams of living in California. One day. Some day.
After summer, school starts, and what do I get but a crush on Brad Chung. He’s Piggy’s big brother, Hoon, who once launched a rubber band at Inah in the Bowne Playground. He’s now called Brad, American-style. I am extra nice to Inah so she won’t blab her mouth off. Anyway, she thinks I have a fat chance. I am not that pretty. Besides, all the plump, braces-wearing seventh- and eighth-grade Korean girls have a crush on him, too. I am merely one of them. But I don’t care. I can’t help it. I get a flighty feeling and goose bumps all over just thinking of his side cowlick, which sends his jet-black hair spinning in a circle. Simply passing him in the school hallway, I get all dizzy and stupid. Moreover, he has the kind of eyes that become slits when he smiles or laughs. (Salina Ong says Richard Gere has the same kind of eyes, but neither Inah nor I knows what Richard Gere looks like.) But it’s not that easy to make Brad notice me out of all the giggling girls. Especially when I get dizzy and stupid just passing him in the school hallway.
One Friday after school, at the public library, Inah and I get a book of love poems and find one called “Sally in Our Alley.” We change a few words around, and in less than five minutes, come up with a song that goes like this: “Of all the boys that are so smart, there’s none like pretty Brad.” Every day at school, we sing “the Brad song” and giggle every time Brad Chung walks by, and we pretend to swoon when he beams at us, eyeing us sideways.
But that’s all that will ever happen with me and Brad because by the time the dark and dull green leaves of summer start turning into bright yellows and reds and russets, I no longer have a crush on him. I have found out that he has a girlfriend. A white girl. With a name like Naomi or Ashley. We saw them hanging around together on the steps in front of the post office building on Main Street. She was trying to tickle him. Ugh!
But Inah is so very happy about that. She says it’s better not to have any crush on any boy because boys are fickle. Anyway, I should wait until I am in high school. I say in high school I will change my name to Leslie or Donna. She says just don’t get big boobs. Ha, ha.
Now no more goose bumps. No more of that floaty feeling in the head. Instead, on our way home from school or the library in the afternoon, Inah and I scoop up the leaves from the sidewalk, where they lie in deep piles like soggy scraps of cloth, and have a leaf fight. We bring them home stuffed in our backpacks, and with a needle and thread sew them together into long leis and hang them on all the doors and on our bedroom window upstairs.
Then one afternoon on the way home, we notice a FOR SALE sign outside the Ash Avenue entrance of “the Chinese house,” and wonder what’s happened to the grandma and grandpa. We go around to Magnolia Place. Inah drops her book bag on the sidewalk, tiptoes her way to the kitchen door and knocks and calls, “Hello, Hullo.” She waits for a long time. Nobody comes to the door.
But the other Chinese grandma is back after having been gone the whole summer. In the evening, when the light turns sapphire blue, she comes around with a skinny, splay-haired Chinese man carrying a long wooden pole. When
ever they spot a female gingko tree (deciduous, according to Trees Worth Knowing, gingkos live over a thousand years) where the leaves have turned bright electric yellow, the man with splayed hair parks himself under it and shakes and knocks the branches with the pole. The stinky gingko nuts fall to the sidewalk in a noisy hail, and the Chinese grandma bends down, half-squatting, and busily, happily and greedily gathers them. They all disappear into her blue canvas bag with the daisy appliqué.
One evening, she sees us coming down the street with Daddy, and she picks herself up. She pulls at Daddy’s arm like it was a door knocker and smiles and points at her bag and shouts something as if he is hard of hearing. Daddy nods and smiles, stretching his lips sideways. She makes a face at him, though, and shakes her head. She knows he is only pretending to understand her. She dips her hand into the bag and pulls out a fistful of gingko nuts and pushes them into Daddy’s hand, making a big flurry of fuss, and waves him off with her toothless smile. We still feel sorry for her that she has to go around gathering stinky gingko nuts with a skinny man with splayed hair.
SIX
We’ve come to Florence at the peak of its tourist season. It’s thoroughly trampled by, and infested with, tourists. In this claustrophobic museum filled with its jealously guarded treasures, I feel hopelessly trapped.
And then, of course, there’s Inah. Relentlessly driven by this strange inner frenzy and insatiable need to see everything, quietly and stoically, she puts up with my bad temper and constant nagging, endures the relentless crowds, the long, endless lines, and suffers through the stifling heat. Without even a peep! Trudging from piazza to piazza, from church to church, from museum to museum, from one long, endless line to another. Pounding the narrow, heat-trapped, mobbed streets through blistering heat with near regimental discipline. So joylessly. Glum and sullen. Methodically and obsessively consulting and checking off the must-see list in her notebook pages. Hardly ever looking people in the eye or talking to them, as though they are mere moving shadows and forms around her.