Translations of Beauty

by Mia Yun

  After a day or two of this with her, I am ready to fold the tent. I feel like I am being force-fed very rich food, much too fast. One by one, my sensory devices shut down. It’s futile, the effort. Really pointless. Yet Inah shows no sign of slowing down. Does it really matter, Inah, if you saw another Caravaggio, Donatello, Botticelli or Michelangelo? The infinite versions of Annunciation with the Magi, Madonna, the Child, saints and angels, the endless, mind-numbing human forms and religious symbols, don’t you ever get tired of them; what do they speak to you? Inah hardly reacts. She simply shuts herself up, withdrawing even further behind the thick, opaque wall she builds around her, as though that’s the only way she can cope with me and the world.

  I begin wandering off, leaving her engrossed and still in front of a fresco or a painting, and I skip through the gilded rooms of palazzi, every inch decorated like a most elaborate cake, and rooms of museums filled with painting after painting, and hushed churches where images of suffering doggedly reinforce the immutable fear of hell. Trying to shake off the nagging suspicion and fear that it is just Inah’s body standing there and that her mind is somewhere else, roaming some other terrain. On a landscape so remote, impossible to reach. That she is just floating through it all. Unconnected. Unnoticed. Unseeing. Lost in her own world. Moving as stealthily as unseen wind. And I am getting weary and tired of that silent, stoic Inah. That pale, drab, dingy, cool and poised Inah. That Inah who hides behind oversized T-shirts and loose jeans and a plain, stringy bob. That Inah who obliterates every trace of femininity. I am afraid that she has become a hidden fossil buried deep inside a rock, dead and unreachable.

  SEVEN

  Daddy rustles us out of bed early in the morning. It’s a long drive to the Adirondacks, and we have to get an early start. It’s our first ever sleepover vacation in America, but Mom’s not even here. She’s still in Korea, where she went to see sick Grandma. Only Grandma died before she could get there. Mom was still on the plane, somewhere over the blue-rippled Pacific. So it turned out she went there only to bury Grandma. Then she found herself unable “to just turn around and come back.” Her feet felt stuck, that’s what she’d said on the phone when she’d called from Korea. Inah and I had puzzled over this statement, but Daddy had said Mom was just being poetic. She must have been homesick and hadn’t known it until she’d gotten there.

  Inah and I make sandwiches to take with us, slapping up canned tuna on white bread and packing them in Ziploc bags. Mom would have made us kim-bop, Inah says wistfully. Without Mom, we’ve been eating badly. Our dinner has been just rice and kimchi and cold mackerel from cans, or soggy fried rice Inah and I make with soy sauce and egg. Daddy doesn’t even know how to cook rice in the rice cooker.

  Inah’s the designated “map reader.” So she rides in the front with Daddy and the I Love NY State map he sent for. Early in the summer, she had another dermabrasion, so even in the car she keeps on her pink floppy hat, pulled low over her face, greasy with the thick sunblock cream she finger smeared on. She looks like a Raggedy Ann on a car trip.

  Not long after passing Albany, we drive into a heavy thunderstorm. It starts with a swirling in the sky over the far horizon. Soon, the sun slips behind the clouds, and the air turns dusklike gray-blue. Then the winds come, blowing straight toward us, bending and swaying the trees along the road in green waves, and sending the leaves and broken branches in a spiraling whirl over the road. We can hear the crackling noise of thunder traveling closer and closer. Suddenly, the sky over us breaks up with jagged lightning, and with a loud peal of thunder, thick, driving rain pours down, pounding and pelting the roof, and the din of the hammering rain fills the car. Almost instantly, the road turns into a raging river, and the rain fog closes in on us in a thick gray wall. The blurry red taillights of the cars in front of us swim and float like extraterrestrial bugs. The red emergency indicator blinks steadily, as if warning of impending doom.

  Daddy, who is having a hard time seeing through the rain-bleared windshield, now all fogged up, hunches over the wheel and fiddles with the buttons, but the defogger doesn’t seem to be working. So Daddy tries to hand-wipe the window. Inah pitches in with a bunch of tissues she grabs from the tissue-box I hand to her, but she ends up making it even worse. Scared, we sit stiffly, holding on to the door handles because we know we could easily get hit by a blinded car behind us. I wonder if God is angry because we’re going on a vacation so soon after Grandma died and for not even feeling sad.

  Crawling along, Daddy manages to make it to the next exit, and we get off the highway. A few minutes later, looking out at the earth-pitting rain, coming down in heavy, slanted ropes of silver, Daddy and I and Inah stand under the dripping eaves at a closed village gas station and auto garage. A car passes by, splashing through the flooded road that winds up a hill and disappears through wet trees. Across, on top of a steep, green slope, a rain-streaked, turquoise crackerbox house stands all by itself on a lonely vigil.

  Daddy and Inah and I are all quiet, thinking about Mom in Korea and wondering what she’s doing. Daddy says it’s August 15 in Korea, Gwangbok-jeol, Independence Day. “Oh,” Inah says, peering out from under the pink floppy hat. She fingers her greasy cheek, healing in shiny red patches, and wipes her fingers on her shirt. I smack her hand, and she yelps.

  “Too bad your grandmother didn’t get to see you two again,” Daddy says. “She probably died with her eyes open.” We don’t say anything. We feel bad because we don’t even remember her face very well. It has been more than five years since we saw her for the last time. We were seven and it was just before we left Korea. Mom and Daddy took us to see her. We took an express bus from Seoul to the village where she lived with her older daughter and her family. We remember the trip mostly in pictures: green rice paddies and farm villages nestling at the foot of pine-tree hills, and dark blue mountains beyond that, slipping past the bus window; the winding, yellow dirt road we followed to Grandma’s village hiding in a narrow valley, walled by mountains; the sad-looking farmhouses we passed on the way, closed down after their owners had left for cities.

  Grandma lived in an old, gray, tile-roofed house with crumbling walls around a sunken courtyard, shaded by a bamboo grove and an old fruit tree with gnarled branches. I remember walking in through the half-open wooden gate. Grandma was sitting alone on the veranda floor, and she didn’t even seem to recognize us at first. Mom went to get Auntie and Uncle at the apple orchard, and Daddy and I and Inah sat with her on the veranda floor. It was late afternoon and thin birds’ cries floated down from the hill, where groves of tall, skinny trees and islands of pine broke the green monotony of the terraced rice paddies and vegetable patches.

  When we left the next day, Grandma held our hands and cried like a sad old bird. She thought America was as far as the sky is from the earth. She didn’t think she would see us again. Outside the crumbling stone-and-mud wall, where white and pink flowers were blooming on tall green velvety stalks, Daddy took a picture of us with her. Afterward, she pointed at the flowers and said, these are Neng-son-wha. Look at them well, she said, and whenever you see these flowers in America, you think of your grandma. The flowers were opaque and lusterless, as though they were folded out of thin rice paper. (In America, they are called hollyhocks, but we didn’t know it then.)

  When the rain becomes just a lazy drizzle, we file into the car and get back to the highway. Soon the sun peeks out from the storm-passed, thin, blue-skinned sky and floods the car with watery light. In the backseat, slouched sideways, Inah sleeps, hugging her pillow. The gray road rushes over and vanishes underneath in endless, monotonous and repetitive rhythm. It’s as though Daddy and I are the only people awake in the whole drowsy world.

  Then, bit by bit, as if someone is cranking up a huge screen in a drive-in movie theater over the flattop of the road, dark green hills and blue-gray mountains with shadows and overlapping lines slowly float up.

  “Ah, see that, Yunah? We are now getting closer to the mountains,” Daddy say
s, his scratchy voice waking up in excitement. “We will be there soon….” Daddy’s voice drifts off into a faraway murmur, and I am outside Grandma’s house in Korea. Along the crumbling wall, dusty, lusterless hollyhocks are in bloom, just like that summer we went to see her. Suddenly, one of the tall stalks turns into Grandma. Her hair is flour-white, and her hanbok, too. White is the color of death and mourning in Korea. “Halmoni!“ I shout, surprised that she isn’t dead.

  “Why did you come?” she yells in a surprisingly loud voice. “After you ruined your sister’s face for life?” She then raises her cane as if she is going to hit me with it. I shrink away, screaming.

  “Yunah! Yunah, wake up!” It’s Daddy’s voice. I open my eyes only to close them right back; the bright light hurts. Daddy says I must have been having a bad dream. I sit up. Inah is still sleeping, dead to the world. Rubbing her greasy, sunblock-cream-covered face on the pillowcase.

  In the morning I wake up in the upper bunk bed in our cabin at the Blue Mountain Lake Inn. In the bed below, I hear Inah talking to Daddy in her sleepy voice. I let my head dangle down. On the picture window filled with tree trunks, the morning is gray.

  “A-ha, lazy Yunah is finally up,” Daddy says. He’s already all dressed. “Get ready for breakfast. Daddy will show you the lake on the way. It’s very pretty.”

  Shivering in the cold drizzle, and a little breathless from the wet, thin mountain air, Inah and I wade after Dad through the tall, wet grass.

  “Look, Daddy! The lake!” Inah points to it, a blue oval mirror. In the middle of it, a small craggy island is marooned, and it holds a tall, thunder-struck pine with jagged stumps. Inah and I rush down to the edge, where wet, empty canoes rest, looking forlorn.

  “Isn’t it pretty, huh?” Daddy says. Inah and I nod, like two Alices in Wonderland. With his hands, Daddy screws our wet hair turning frizzy in the drizzle.

  Inside the nearly empty cafeteria, everyone is wearing a poncho or parka. We sit down at a table by the window so we can look out at the lake, and the sage green hills and the gray-blue mountains beyond, fuzzy and grainy in the rain mist. Inah and I shovel in cornflakes in cold milk. Daddy munches on white-bread toast and sips hot coffee, and leafs through all the guide booklets and pamphlets he collected from the rack at the doorway. If it rains all day, we can’t go hiking, he says. We will have to find something else to do.

  “Hi!” I turn around and see a round-faced Asian girl in a lavender dress printed with yellow flowers gazing up at me, moving her thumb around inside her mouth like it’s a lollipop. I wonder where she’s popped out from.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “My name is Chang-mi,” she says. “It’s a Korean name. Are you Korean?”

  “Yes, I am. I know your name means rose.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, nodding. “But you know what? My whole name is Phoebe Chang-mi Wilkinson.”

  “That’s a long name for a little girl like you.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says again. Suddenly, her thumb inside her mouth stops moving. And she stands very still. She is staring hard at Inah. In turn, Inah swivels her head around me, screws her face at the girl and says in her cold, cutting voice, “Nice meeting you. Bye now!”

  “OK. Bye.” But she doesn’t go away. She just stands there, examining Daddy (who doesn’t seem to notice or hear anything as usual) and me and then Inah again.

  “Daddy?”

  “Uh …” Daddy looks up and, surprised to see her, says, “Oh.” She smiles at Daddy expectantly.

  “Apa, she’s Korean. Her name is Chang-mi.”

  “Oh, pretty name,” Daddy says. “Where’s your family?” Chang-mi half-turns and points to a table across the room. We turn to look, and they all wave. Her family is white.

  “That’s my mom and daddy and grandma. And my baby brother, he is Korean like me,” she says. “His name is Daniel.”

  “Like we want to know,” Inah blurts out.

  “Huh, Inah! Be nice!” Daddy says.

  “Why should I?”

  “She’s happy to meet other Koreans.”

  “How come she’s so ugly?” Chang-mi asks, pointing to Inah.

  “Huh, like you’re so pretty yourself. You shi-gol-te-gi,“ says Inah, calling her a country bumpkin in Korean. Chang-mi looks at Inah uncertainly, turning red in the face. She then turns around and dashes off.

  “What did you do that for?” Daddy scolds Inah. “You’re not very nice!”

  “But she’s the one who called me ugly first,” Inah says sullenly.

  “She’s a little girl. She doesn’t know any better. But you’re older. Daddy always thought you were a good-hearted person. Never knew you could be mean like that! Next time, think before you talk.” Daddy glares at Inah, and she just hushes up, shocked, because he hardly ever raises his voice. Daddy doesn’t say anything more, but he still looks mad, the way he stares out the window. Pulling at her hands nervously under the table, Inah steals quick glances at him from the corner of her eye. She knows she has disappointed him. Daddy waits and waits for her apology, but it doesn’t come. Finally, folding up the pamphlets, he gets up.

  “Let’s go,” he says. Inah looks like she’s going to burst out crying.

  It rains on and off in drizzles the rest of the day, and Inah’s kind of quiet. From the Adirondacks museum, Daddy drives us to a mountain peak. It’s windy and cold enough to make us wish we had heavier jackets. Daddy and Inah and I stand for long minutes, shivering and whipped by the wind, looking at the clouds moving in billows over the ash-colored Adirondack Mountains; craggy slopes and crooked spines, spreading in every direction like a dead sea. It feels as though we are standing atop the world.

  The next morning the sun is out, but it’s a weak, diluted sun. After breakfast, Daddy rents a canoe and we paddle around the glacier blue lake. And then we spend the rest of the day hiking, following the trails that run through the woods of furs and pine, spruce and ferns and moss. Daddy often makes us stop and feel the tree bark and the smooth green moss spreading on the fallen trees, and he points out the way sunlight plays on everything, changing the colors and shapes and the way it glides over the moss-covered rocks. We stop to drink in the fragrance of the forest, filling our lungs and listening to the sounds of the woods: leaves rustling in the wind, birds flapping their wings as they take off from the trees and tree branches falling in soft, dull sounds. In the middle of the hushed woods, where trees shoot up in clean, straight lines, skyward and pointy, we tilt back our heads and follow the lines of tree trunks up and up until our eyes water, through meshes of branches and leaves, to the canopy top, where the sunlight pours through the dense foliage in powdery gold dust before splintering into thin, arrow-straight pencil lines.

  But it’s not like it used to be, when Daddy used to take us on day trips to the Harriman State Park, Bear Mountain and the Catskills (which he thought looked just like Korean mountains) and when we used to cling to his every word. Inah does everything perfunctorily, just to please him. She’s not even interested in botanizing and has left all the Ziploc bags she brought from home at the inn. Daddy keeps asking us if we’re having a good time. Yes, we are, Daddy, we answer. But he knows we are being less than honest, and is disappointed. We’re growing up and changing.

  EIGHT

  On the way back from hiking, Daddy gets lost and we miss the dinner service at the inn’s cafeteria. At the rec room, where we see Chang-mi and her little brother trying to get a Ping-Pong ball going across the table, a woman says the only place to eat for miles around is in town.

  Tired and hungry, Inah and I trudge out to town on foot with Daddy. The sun has just set. The light is blue all over, and below the far sky, where feathery slivers of orange and purple are barely traceable, mountains and hunkering hills are turning into blue-black silhouettes. Not a single car passes by on the newly paved, serpentine black road, fringed with the skinny fall cosmos and painted rocks giving off a metallic gleam in the blue light. From the roadside bush, even a fall cricket mak
es only a tentative attempt to try out its vocal cords before going quiet. Then all the way, it’s just the sound of our footfalls in the hushed, empty blue world.

  We find the town wholly devoid of people or traffic. Inah races up the stone steps to the restaurant, which is built like a chalet. “Daddy?! It’s closed!” she shouts back, pointing at the sign on the door of the town’s only restaurant. “It says, ‘Sorry, we are closed for the season.’”

  “That’s too bad,” Daddy says. “It looks like a nice restaurant, too.” Disappointed, Inah comes back down the steps. She’s known for getting all cranky when she is hungry.

  “How hungry are you?” Daddy asks.

  “I might just die,” Inah replies, exaggerating. Daddy laughs.

  “And it was your fault we missed the turn,” I say. “You’re supposed to be the map reader.”

  “No it wasn’t. Are you blind?!” she says.

  Tailing Daddy, we cross the street and head down to the town’s only general store. The parking lot in front of the store is empty. And, as we feared, we find the store, even if only for the day, closed. Inah, unconvinced by the WE’RE CLOSED sign, peers through the glass door of the store, longingly staring at the bags of chips and cookies in the rack. She finally gives up, turns around. It’s now inky black all over and the sky has expanded and risen into a high, immense, sapphire-colored dome.

  Not knowing what to do, Inah and I and Daddy stand there outside the closed store, spattered by the white and grainy, misty lamplight. As if stranded in a puzzling dream. Having traveled a zillion dream waves away from Flushing. Shivering in the rapidly cooling mountain air and vaguely sensing that something is being forever lost that very fleeting moment.