by Mia Yun
All of a sudden, without warning, crickets start in the black clumps of bushes up the street in a bold, dreamy chorus.
“Daddy?!” Inah tugs at his arm as if waking up from a strange but brief dream.
“Uh …” Daddy looks down at her and says, “Not to worry. Daddy won’t let you go to bed hungry.”
“But everything’s closed!”
“How about we go back to the inn and go out in the car? There must be a place to eat somewhere.” Inah murmurs and whines. We walk back to the inn and climb into the car. As Daddy drives, we stick our faces out the window to the cool wind that rushes by, grabbing our hair and whipping it back to our faces in sharp needle sprays.
“How about singing?” Daddy says, but we can’t think of a song for the world of us. Not even Inah, the nonstop chatterbox who loves all the groovy songs. We are starving, and we miss Flushing, home and Mom.
“Daddy, look!” Jumping back to life, Inah points to a building sitting atop a hill above the road we have just passed. On the huge, floodlit banner that’s slung across the front of the building, we read beer, pool and pizza. Daddy makes a quick U-turn and drives the car up the steep, dirt driveway. We can tell the building has been hastily put together for the summer season: It sits on a plot of red mud claimed from the waist of a scraggy pine hill, and part of the outer walls are still exposing Sheetrock. We notice, too, that it’s all pickups and flatbed trucks that are parked there in the muddy ground.
Out of the car, Inah and I follow Daddy through the door and stand facing a big room with a long bar to our left. Pool tables are scattered around the rest of the room where, in the lamplights, smoke clouds drift like dirty yellow fog. To our right, a small attached dining room sits empty with a few tables.
Inah and I jump a little when the door belatedly shuts with a clack behind us. Suddenly, every head turns, and the room goes very quiet. The men stare at us, practicing the same silent, fixed look as the stuffed deer heads mounted on the wall. They look like lumberjacks we’ve seen on TV. We stand there, silently stared at like swatted flies on the wall. No one comes over or talks to us.
“Let’s go sit down,” Daddy says, pointing to the dining room, and, as if that’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for, Inah and I start for the room. We pick a table against a wood-paneled wall and sit down. Daddy goes over to the service window, where a sign above it says it serves pizza and salad only, and he orders a large pizza pie and three cans of 7 UP. The men at the bar are still staring. Daddy comes back to the table, and we wait. Self-conscious, Inah and I sit as stiffly as cardboard cutouts, as if that’s what is expected of us. Then Inah, like an insect that is tired of pretending to be dead, starts fidgeting, sliding down the seat and up, trying to make the staring men disappear from the range of her sight. Finally, she slouches down, resting her chin on her folded arms on the sticky table. From a pool table, balls break in a click-clack, and it’s quiet again.
“Daddy?” Inah says pleadingly, slinging a furtive glance toward the bar.
“It’s OK. Sit up,” he says. Amazed and dumbfounded, Inah and I stare at him. How does Daddy know? He’s sitting with his back to the bar. We thought only animals carry eyes in the back of their heads! “And Inah, now that you’re inside, take off your hat.” Inah reluctantly sits up and pulls down her pink floppy hat. We sit and sit, staring at our hands and the wall.
“Why don’t we study the map while waiting?” Daddy suggests.
“But I left it in the car,” Inah says. When Daddy gets up to go out for it, she looks scared. She jumps in her seat when the door closes after him. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her afraid of anything.
“Like to play husband-wife-concubine?” I ask Inah, trying to sound normal. Inah shakes her head. She has seen one of the men at the bar stand up. He’s slowly heading toward the dining room where we are sitting, scared to death. Inah looks frantic, and flushed in the cheeks. My heart is racing so loud that I can hear it thump. Tense and with strange anticipation, we sit and wait, watching him from the corners of our eyes.
In a flash, I remember the story Cousin Ki-hong told last Christmas, home from Stanford University. Over Thanksgiving, with his friend, Cousin Ki-hong motorcycled down to Baja California, Mexico. One scorching afternoon, they found themselves in a small fishing village. Feeling thirsty and hot, they walked into a dark, dirt-floored bar. As soon as they stepped inside, all the Mexican men turned their heads and stared at Cousin Ki-hong, a Kiss fan, in long, shaggy hair, tight black jeans hugging his skinny rocker legs, a tiny silver hoop earring in one ear, and his friend, a stocky Korean guy who was built like a brick house. Nobody moved, and nobody said a word to them. They just stared and stared. Like in a silent movie. This went on about several long minutes until a man at the bar got up, walked to a jukebox standing against the mud wall and slipped in a coin. To their amazement, a Yoko Ono song flew out of the jukebox. (We:Who’s Yoko Ono? Cousin Ki-hong:Wow, is this a generation gap or what? You girls live in a cultural wasteland, don’t you?) Ha, ha, ha. Soon everyone in the bar was laughing and clinking beer bottles.
When Cousin Ki-hong told us the story, he hinted at some dark danger avoided. He said that it’s always a little dangerous to travel in this continent when you are an Asian. It’s a lot like rolling dice. The word dicey means just that. The key is never to ingratiate yourself and never show them you’re afraid. Inah and I, so impressed, later looked up the words dicey and ingratiate in our Webster’s Dictionary.
I see the man’s feet in heavy mountain boots, the toes all curled up. They stop. Inah can’t help it: She turns bug-eyed when he puts his hands on the back of the chair where Daddy has been sitting. I steal a quick look at him while his eyes slowly tour Inah’s scarred face, blotchy and waxy. He is a little cross-eyed, and his eyes are pigeon gray, as if faded from blue. His oatmeal-colored hair hangs in stringy strands, and below his cutoff sweatshirt sleeves, his Captain Cook arms, sunburned to salmon color and full of freckles and curly gold-flecked hair, are as thick as trees. He looks a little like Jesus Christ in the picture hanging on the living-room wall in Jessica Han’s apartment.
Inah doesn’t dare to look at him. In her hands, her pink floppy hat is being twisted and twisted into a tight knot. Suddenly, he turns to me and catches my darting eye, and I think I am going to burst with fear.
“Yo kids happen to speak English?” he says in a surprisingly warm voice. Inah springs back to life and eagerly nods, as if she has turned into a yo-yo. “Well, then, yo kids mine tellin’ yor daddy, when he gits back that is, we not too crazy seeing Chinks or Japs here in dis part of the country.” Inah snaps to attention and sits up. From the look, I just know she’s going to tell him we are neither Chinks nor Japs, and he will ask us what we are then and say it makes no difference anyway, that we are gooks. I pinch Inah’s leg so hard that she jumps in her seat. Instead, we say nothing and sit curled and still like two stepped-on worms. To our relief, he starts to walk away. Then, as if having a second thought, he turns his head and says, “Yor folks ain’t goin’ find no place serving rice around here, either. Better off goin’ back where yo come from originally.”
When Daddy comes back with the map, we don’t say a quip about the man. The pizza comes, sizzling with thick, melted cheese. We stuff ourselves so fast that when we get back in the car later, we can still feel the big lump of undercooked dough of the pizza sitting inside.
As Daddy drives, Inah and I quietly watch the lonely night road run away, chased by the high beams, slithering and climbing and descending, bending and then straightening itself out like an unfurling ribbon. Trees forming black, ragged walls on both sides of the road swish by. We enter and leave black night that seems endless.
“Look at that,” Daddy says, slowing down the car. He turns off the high beams and points toward the edge of the black woods, where fireflies are zinging around soundlessly, beaming on and off in blue-green lights. They are more beautiful than green stars that buzz in the summer sky.
; “Ah, it’s been a long time,” Daddy says, in a voice syrupy thick and encrusted with the sudden rush of longing. “When Daddy was a farm boy growing up in Korea, they would be out all over on a summer night …”
“Daddy, but we like Flushing better,” Inah says, shaking with a hiccup.
“Why? It’s so clean and beautiful here! What’s so good about dirty and crowded Flushing, you can’t wait to go back?!”
Suddenly, heaving, Inah flies to the window, pushes her head out and throws up. The pizza and soda shoot out of her mouth in thick, sticky streams and disperse and scatter into the thin, pine-scented mountain air. I hand Inah a bunch of Kleenex and rub her back. Daddy asks her if she wants to stop. Inah wipes her mouth and hangs her head out for fresh air. No, Daddy, she says, curled over the window ledge, trembling and shaking. Keep going, I feel better already.
NINE
Florence that numbs me during the day, induces dreams at night. Feeding on my fears and longings, my restless mind regurgitates as I paddle through sluggish sleep. I dream a thousand dreams: I am standing on Ponte Vecchio, leaning over the side. There, there is a body, down there, floating on the jade green Arno River. My heart jumps into my throat: It’s Inah, the body afloat facedown. It’s her hair, a black loosened mop. It’s her khaki jeans and white T-shirt, swollen bags. I scream and scream.
I am inside the empty, dark and echoing Duomo, walking up the aisle. Inah is somehow missing. Suddenly, a snow white pigeon flies out from behind a pillar and shoots straight up toward the dome, beating its wings, and disappears. I look up: Inah is looking down from the cupola, her arms spread, ready to jump. Don’t, Inah, don’t. Choking with fear and throbbing with hot panic, I run, climbing up the narrow and dark and endless semicircles of stairway laid out in foot-worn, smooth, cold stones. Desperately trying to reach her before she jumps. Stumbling and slipping. Getting nowhere.
I am wandering through the rooms at the Uffizi Gallery, looking for that beautiful Florentine youth with dark brown eyes, hooked nose and black curly hair in one of the portraits. Feverish with longing. In and out of endless rooms. Finally, in despair, I walk out to the sun-flooded hallway, and he’s there. Smiling. But there’s Inah behind him, watching me with her cold, mocking eyes. I turn around and walk away, ashamed and brokenhearted.
Inside the entrance of a small church, in the nook of the wall, stands a porcelain statue of the Madonna. She is wearing a sky blue robe, and her head is draped in white. As I look up at her, her face turns into that of Inah’s, and she starts weeping silently. Her teardrops roll down her white porcelain face and fall to the floor and calcify into red glass beads. I pick them up, and they melt back into blood in my hands. I run out of the church screaming and holding up my bloodied hands.
I wake up from these hideous, phantasmagorical dreams dry-mouthed, sweaty and exhausted, screaming voicelessly under the tangled sheet, only to find Inah sound asleep next to me. I drift back to sleep, where more dreams await.
In another dream, I am back with Mom and Inah in the old Japanese house in Korea Mom used to call “the bad-luck house.” Mom is standing near the kitchen door, dressed in silk hanbok: short water-blue top and long, streaming azalea pink skirt. Next to her, little Inah stands, holding one of those lotus lanterns they string along in temples on Buddha’s birthday. On her face, she is wearing an elaborate mask of a rouged Korean bride, leaking a sly smile out of her painted lips. I wonder why she is wearing a mask when Mom and she turn around and walk through the sliding kitchen door to the alley outside. The light from Inah’s lantern throws shifting shadows around her. Not wanting to be left behind alone, I try to run after them, but my feet won’t move.
The dream is so vivid that when I wake up, I can still see the tiny, delicate creases on the pink-dyed rice paper of lotus petals. I realize the mask Inah was wearing in the dream was the same mask Dad made for her on our first Halloween in America. Inah and I helped him tear up a whole stack of old newspapers, which Dad soaked in a bucket of water. Later, he pounded them into a pulpy mess, mixing in the flour glue he’d cooked up on the stove. Inah trembled with excitement when her hand-molded mask was finally dry, and Dad brought out the paints and brushes to draw a face on it.
That Halloween evening, Inah was a Korean bride and I was the gatekeeper of hell seen on temple gates in Korea. My mask boasted big, bulging eyes and sharp fangs pushing out of the blood red mouth. In my right hand, I carried a samji-chang, a three-pronged sword Dad made out of crushed aluminum foil, and in my left, a plastic jack-o’ lantern.
But it was Inah who made a big hit. In her Korean bride mask with that sly expression and in Mom’s Korean silk apron tied around her chest, she looked so comical. We went knocking on every door in our Bowne Street apartment building, belching out the tongue-twisting phrase, “Trick or treat!” after Jessica Han, the cat, and her baby brother, the Superman. Inah always got the most attention. Oh, she’s so cute, everyone said. Cute! Cute! Cute! How pretty! So adorable! The old Jewish ladies put all of their pennies into Inah’s jack-o’-lantern, and later even her apron pockets started sagging with mini Milky Way bars and Hershey’s Kisses. Jessica Han’s baby brother threw a jealous temper tantrum and I followed Inah, poking her behind with my aluminum-foil-wrapped sword, but she was having so much fun, she couldn’t care less. In fact, she loved the attention so much that for days afterward, she’d walk around the streets with the mask on. To her thrill, on the street, people would stop, look at her and laugh. It tickled her that people couldn’t see her real face. It was a different kind of attention for a change, and she loved it.
There is something very depressing about the dream of Mom and Inah, and I can’t go back to sleep. I try to remind myself that it’s just the time of day when life energy dips to the lowest level and everything appears much bleaker than it really is. But it doesn’t help. My head keeps churning out images, and my mind keeps wandering off.
Finally, I give up and slip out of the bed. I tiptoe to the window and open the green plastic shutters. The light bothers Inah. She groans and stirs in bed, turning and kicking off the sheet. Then slowly rearranging her long, lean, boyish legs, she folds and refolds her arms around the pillow, trying to get comfortable. Mesmerized, I watch the way her body languidly moves itself in the heaviness of sleep and the way the small of her back above her narrow hips cups like a porcelain bowl. In her white cotton tank top and white panties, the body Inah hides like a secret, like shame under oversized T-shirts and baggy pants, looks unbelievably exquisite and sensual in the morning light, which gilds her skin taut and smooth, like a water-rounded pebble.
How it used to terrify Mom. The idea that Inah would grow up and become a woman one day only to be denied the joy and the pain of loving and being loved. But no matter, she has become a woman. A twenty-eight-year-old sexual being with a beautiful body that must feel desires. And how hard Inah must have tried all these years to become a stone incapable of thoughts of love, longing and yearning. Even in her dreams. If not to allay Mom’s fear then to spare herself the humiliation and indignity of not being wanted or desired.
Soon, Inah is still again, immobilized by sleep. Her body is again that pristine and unexplored and untouched virgin territory. It looks as innocent and pure as that of a prepubescent girl. It’s as if she’s regressing back to the child she once was. Before she became a prisoner of the immutable fear. I can almost believe that when she wakes up, she will be again that happy and relentlessly upbeat chatterbox.
PART FOUR
ONE
Saturday afternoon on the July Fourth weekend, we are in the car, driving to Staten Island for Uncle Shin’s housewarming party. Northern Boulevard already looks like a parking lot with tangles of cars. Mom fiddles with the car air conditioner, sputtering and purring like the wings of an injured bird, but after a while, she gives up.
In the back, Inah and I sit at opposite ends, leaving a wide Demilitarized Zone in the middle. Inah is quiet and sullen, as usual. She’s got a pink jean skirt on b
ecause Mom wouldn’t let her wear her usual uniform of an extra-large white T-shirt and baggy khaki jeans. She fidgets and fidgets as if she doesn’t quite know what to do with her pair of bare legs, skinny and pale as beansprouts. Although she has added almost three inches since last summer, at fourteen, she’s still the same flat-chested, straight beanpole with no apparent signs of curves or boobs.
Inah shifts in her seat, lifts her legs and folds them under her butt. I give her straying foot a smack. She turns, glares and hisses.
“Your feet are dirty,” I say.
“Like it’s your business,” Inah says. “And you got zits.”
“You’re swearing.”
“Not!”
“Yes, you are!”
“BS.”
“See, there!”
“Ugh!!” Mom turns and shoots me that don’t-you-dare-start-a-fight look.
“See?!” Inah says. I sneak a hard pinch on her skinny leg, and she swiftly responds with a kick to my leg. She’s lucky, because if it weren’t for Dad, she would have had it coming to her.As for Mom, I don’t really care. She always sides with Inah anyway, and I always end up getting the bum rap. More so ever since Inah got into the coveted Stuyvesant High, one of the two best public high schools in the city. Now Mom treats her more like a celestial queen. She’s exempted from all the chores. She doesn’t have to lift a scrawny finger at home.
“You go up and study,” Mom says to her as soon as she puts down her spoon at the dinner table. It means it’s always my turn to do the dishes. So just to rile her up a bit, I say, “Go ahead, Inah. The road to Harvard can’t be that smooth.” It never fails to annoy her.
“You’re twisted, you know that?” She hisses, glaring at me, like she would love to swallow me down whole. And then before we know it, we are swearing and cursing, calling each other every kind of abominable name we can think of. I call her a geek, a dyke, a butch, a creep and some other names I would never utter under normal circumstances. She calls me a meatball, a cow, a hare-brain, an egghead, a fat-head, a bonehead, a moron and a bimbo. Luckily, Mom doesn’t know what the worst of those words mean. If she did, she would kill herself. As it is, she says we act like sworn enemies.