Translations of Beauty

by Mia Yun

  Mom and Dad were there, too, that day. I remember how Mom looked so wistful, watching Jennifer Kim, Cousin Ki-hong’s wife, lumber their bun-faced girl around in a rainbow-sleeved Korean costume. And every time I looked into the den off the kitchen, Dad, alone and sleepy-eyed, was watching lions in the African tundra on the muted TV.

  In the living room, as usual, Uncle Shin held a noisy court from the fancy rococo-style couch preserved like bones under a vinyl cover. (Dad used to teasingly quiz him if it was Louis XIV or XV, and Uncle Shin would always answer good-naturedly, “Just Louis.”) At one point, I even overheard him quote his favorite old Korean saying, “Work like a dog, live like a nobleman.” He was rehashing the old story of his wig-peddling days in Harlem. “And think that I never even been near a college gate in Korea. They must mean a man like me when Koreans say, ‘A dragon rising out of a gutter.’ America is a great country or what?”

  When I later went to say good-bye, Dad turned off the TV and said he would go for a walk; he had eaten too much. Mom was nowhere. The living room was empty, too. In the bedroom upstairs, where I went to get my bag and jacket, Jennifer was changing her baby on the bed. I sat down and helped her with the powder. Then she left to go to the bathroom, and her baby went into a frantic cry. She returned in a fussy flurry, unbuttoned her blouse, whipped out her milk-swollen, white moon of a breast and slid the dark nipple into her girl’s mouth, putting an immediate stop to the crying.

  I remember sitting there, a little shocked. Maybe because Jennifer (she was our age, but she seemed so much more mature than either of us) did everything so casually and nonchalantly and expertly. Maybe because it was a picture in which I had never placed Inah or myself. It didn’t seem then and doesn’t even now that we would ever arrive at such a stage in life.

  Jennifer looked adoringly at her sleepy-eyed baby, suckling and playing with the pearl strand around her neck, and she dabbed off the milk dribbling down her daughter’s chin and giggled. “Isn’t she so amazing?” she said, her voice ringing with that simple, pure joy. I felt sick. I couldn’t believe she could have pulled off such a miracle. The song says, people do it every day, but it still seemed a miracle.

  “God, Yunah, I love her so much,” she moaned and solemnly added, “it’s almost scary.” She meant it. “Although when I first saw her, I was a little surprised,” she said. I must have looked confused.

  “You know,” Jennifer said. “Her face, it was so Korean!”

  “What did you think she would look like?” I asked, incredulous. “You and Ki-hong are both Korean!”

  “I don’t know. Big blue eyes. Not-so-flat nose. And blond hair?” I laughed, but she wasn’t entirely joking. “Remember?” she continued. “The surprise? Growing up? Your face in the mirror? The flat Asian face that stared out at you? Like a stranger? I don’t know about you, but it surprised me every time that I didn’t look anything like white kids. You see white faces every day, day in, day out, at school and on TV, you start to think that you look like them, too. I used to have a real complex.”

  “So you’re just one more banana. White inside, yellow outside,” I said.

  “Aren’t you one? Even my mother’s so used to seeing white people on TV, she no longer thinks Korean faces could be beautiful.”

  I had never thought I would ever envy Uncle Shin’s family, but that day, I did. Not for their nouveau riche house or money, but for their ability to be happy. They harvested the fruit of life so effortlessly. What was their secret?

  I look at Inah. Her face grizzled with the dappled shadows of leaves, she sits still, her book left open on her lap and her eyes pinned to some faraway hill. The sensual Inah earlier, with her pristine body sheathed in the morning light, is now traceless. She is again the plain Inah, with the marred face framed with stringy hair and her exquisite body encased in loose clothes. I always thought that I knew the answers to and causes of Inah’s actions and nonactions: her face. But a week with her has left me more confused than ever. I am not sure about anything.

  I sit up, and she turns to look at me. I toss off the grass I pull up. It drifts down lifelessly. Inah follows it with her eye and looks away. I feel the chance to talk to her is fast slipping away. If I am anxious, it’s because talking to her is never a spontaneous event. It’s so hard to gauge her mood and harder still to predict her reaction. And more than anything, I hate having to watch every word I say. So often the effort itself turns into an insurmountable impediment. I know that even if I come up with just the sort of an opener that might chip away at the impassive wall Inah has built around her, it is not going to be enough. It will only end up sounding like a contrived, rehearsed pep talk.

  “Inah, you know Mom’s worried,” I say simply in the end. I have no backup words or contingency plans. The muscles on her face visibly tighten. “I don’t know what you talked about on the phone with Mom and whether you told her why you quit your studies. I do know she was upset for a while, but I think she’s OK now. She just wants to make sure you’re OK.” I know it’s only half true. Sometimes I blame Mom for Inah’s wanderings. Mom, who greedily bore all the guilt for what happened to Inah’s face, always pushed her hard. Setting the bar so impossibly high. Always an excellent student, Inah skipped grades and stayed on honor rolls. But it was never enough for her. What followed next was more important. Inah’s little successes were mere stepping stones to reach the Zenith. Mom refused to see her scarred face as an impediment. Just the opposite. She just couldn’t understand that in the end, it was Inah’s choice and Inah’s life. She kept raising her expectations. Until it became impossible for everyone. The years after Inah left home, Mom resolutely stood facing her, fixated on the daughter who kept breaking her heart. Mom hardly ever seemed to notice me, even long after Inah became her sun that failed to shine.

  Still, when it was time for me to leave, I stayed instead. Mom didn’t have to ask. I chose NYU because it was just a bridge, a river, a subway ride away. I could always return. At a moment’s notice. I became a good daughter. Not that Mom ever appreciated that. She took me for granted. I had the face, even considered pretty, the same face that had been snatched away from Inah. I would live a normal life, have plenty of chances to be happy as a woman, she must have thought. I don’t know whether Mom was ever secretly disappointed. I don’t think I ever mentioned one of my boyfriends to her, so unsure how she would feel about it. Sometimes, I felt I lived a double life. But I was always there for her, as her gal Friday so that she could turn to me for help. But I can’t rescue Inah for her. I am not capable of such a feat. And I am getting tired of playing a good daughter.

  Inah isn’t going to help me out. She just sits silently. “Inah, don’t get me wrong, because I am not telling you what to do. You know, no matter what, Dad and I will always support you, but there’s Mom to deal with. I guess she worries more because you’re always so far away. You know how she goes through these emotional highs and lows. All depending on what you’re doing at the time. Now she’s got this picture of you aimlessly drifting around. And to be honest, I can’t deal with Mom anymore. Just tell her what your plan is. You must have one, no? Even if it’s tentative? Like how long you are going to stay in Rome. Anything. So I can relay it to Mom. She deserves to know that much.”

  “I wish I knew,” Inah says, her voice trailing off like a wisp of smoke. After a long while, she adds, “I just can’t live the life Mom wants me to.” I don’t know why I get the impression that Inah is still resisting. That she has just bypassed the real thing and instead delivered an empty shell. A universal truth rather than the personal truth. Disappointed, I mull over what she has just said. What kind of life does Mom want her to live? I am not sure I know. Mom’s worried. Simple. All she now wishes is that Inah would carve out a form of life. Nothing so colossal. Time has a way of humbling a planner and a dreamer like Mom. All of us have been finding out how elusive even an ordinary life with ordinary dreams can be. That seems to come by so easily, effortlessly, to other people. To people lik
e Uncle Shin and Cousin Ki-hong. Their families grow and prosper. They dream simpler dreams. They make practical plans. They are happier. Somewhere I once read that it is happiness, not unhappiness, that ruins us. But a line like that no longer comforts me. I want us to be happy. For a change. I don’t know why our life still threatens to fall apart. Where do you go to get the stamps of ordinary life?

  “I don’t think Mom expects you to be an Einstein or a Madame Curie,” I say. Inah hoots, spitting out air through her lips. I look away, not wanting to see the way her scarred lips pull, crunching the rest of the face. “Come home, Inah. Even if it’s just for a while until you know what you are doing. It doesn’t have to be to New York. I know you don’t want to be too close by. Just show your face.You know Mom and Dad would be real thrilled to see you. You can’t go on like this forever. What are you doing in Rome? How about money? What are you living on?” I know I am still beating around the bush. What I really want to ask her and what I really want to know is more abstract. I want to know what it is, that elusive something she is searching for.

  Inah sighs. She doesn’t want to promise anything. Maybe she doesn’t know what she is searching for, either. Maybe she is swimming in the dark like the rest of us.

  The sky over the hills is starting to turn dark purple-blue. I hope for a rainstorm.

  “Remember, Inah? Dad always said that rain comes from the east.” Inah simply smiles.

  THREE

  The afternoon of Dad’s birthday, Mom calls from the travel agency and asks me to meet her in front of Kum-wha, the “Golden Flower” Korean supermarket. She needs me to help her shop.

  August is nearly over, but outside the sun still feels prickly hot. Down Ash, the sidewalk, patched with splashes of sunlight and shade, looks like a quilt. Behind the gray wall of the house on Syringa Place, sunflowers, huge and bright and combusting yellow against the dazzling blue of the sky, hang their necks from tall, velvety green stalks. The gray, diamond-shaped seeds embedding the centers have turned dark brown, as though they have been slowly dying all summer from self-immolation. Soon they will be pulled out and discarded on the sidewalk, the roots and the floppy leaves and all, and the summer will be over.

  It has been a strangely quiet summer. Inah, working on some science project at a biology lab in Manhattan, has rarely been home. Mom’s been working six days a week all summer, as it’s the busiest season at travel agencies. Even Dad, still out of work, has seemed to manage to spend very little time at home. The house usually sits empty when I come home in the afternoon from my summer job at the YWCA, where Jessica and I work as camp counselors. At some point during the summer, I began to dread coming home. I hated walking into the empty house. It always made me furious for some reason.

  Mom looks hot in the sun standing outside the supermarket. She asks me why it has taken me so long, and I just shrug. Sometimes, Mom is just too much of a dose of reality. Inside, at the fish counter, I hang back as she pokes and fingers the long, silver tails in the ice bed. It’s Dad’s favorite fish and I’ve seen them only in Korean markets. Mom lifts up a couple of them and puts them back down. She smells her fingers and makes a face and says, “The fish isn’t that fresh.” The man behind the counter doesn’t seem too happy with the way Mom molests them, but she just ignores him. Finally she picks two.

  Carrying the grocery bags, I sulk all the way home. Distracted by her own thoughts, Mom doesn’t even notice it. Inah has come home while I was gone. She opens the door, takes the grocery bags from Mom and carries them to the kitchen. Mom takes out the fish from the grocery bag and hands them to me. I carry them to the sink to wash and salt them. But the fish stink something awful when I unwrap them.

  “Mom, I think they’re spoiled,” I say, holding my nose. She comes over, saying, “I knew it.” She pokes at the skin and angrily rewraps the fish. “Take it back!” she says, handing the package to me.

  “Now? Mom, it’s kind of far,” I say.

  “Go with Inah,” she says, as if that makes sense. I know better than to argue with her. Inah and I go out and walk all the way down to Kissena, where we chuck the fish into a garbage can. We then walk back through Beech just to kill time. I ask Inah if she got a present for Dad. She shakes her head and mumbles, “Like it’s very likely Dad remembers it’s his birthday.”

  “So what? You do!”

  Inah doesn’t say anything. At Magnolia, we pass “the Chinese house.” On the ground off the kitchen, a big green garbage Dumpster is sitting. And someone also has cut all the shaggy branches off the pine trees. We rarely come around this way these days. It’s been months, too, since we last went for a walk with Dad. It was sometime in June when the printing company he worked for went bust and Dad lost his job.

  Dad still leaves home every morning, but we have no idea where he goes and how he spends his days. When he comes home at night, he has often eaten, too. With someone or another. No one we know—a man he met at his college alumni association, he says when Mom asks. Inah and I kind of suspect that he just goes somewhere and spends the day killing time because he doesn’t want us to see him idling at home. Because he doesn’t even seem to be trying to get a job. We know it’s not that easy at fifty-eight.

  For a while during the summer, though, Dad seemed busy. With a Korean man he had met, he used to drive out to masonries and granite quarries. Sometimes, they even went on overnight trips as far as Massachusetts. From the trips, he would bring home little pieces of granite samples in Ziploc bags, and glossy leaflets and Korean books on stonework filled with pictures of traditional Korean stone pagodas and lanterns and step-by-step illustrations. But it just stopped as abruptly as it had started. Another time, after going to see a Korean man who owned a motel in the Catskills, he floated the idea of getting into the motel business. But Mom torpedoed the idea. So everything kind of fizzled out. One way or another. From lack of feasibility or money or both. Or Dad would eventually lose interest.

  Then as the summer passed, we noticed how Mom and Dad talked less and less to each other. If they ever did, it was usually about something trivial like taking out the garbage or fixing the dripping faucet. Even then, it was like a shuttlecock match, their conversations flying and bouncing off, as they would never sit down together, face-to-face. They were always doing something else. Mom at the sink. Dad reading a Korean newspaper at the dining table or on the couch in the living room. Sometimes, I wondered if they remembered each other’s face.

  “Back already?” Mom says when I walk into the kitchen. She’s rolling out meatballs on the flour-dusted cutting board at the dining table. “Got the money back?” I nod. Inah, who has snuck up to her room to get the money for the fish, comes in nonchalantly and puts it in the drawer. I wash the vegetables and peel and mince garlic and ginger. Inah mops the floor and goes out to the backyard and brings back a bunch of red roses from the climbing rosebush Auntie Minnie brought when we moved here. The petals are almost black. Inah sticks them in a Sunkist bottle and places it in the center of the dining table. Mom is growing quieter and quieter.

  With the dinner all ready, we sit around the Formica-top dining table in the kitchen. The clock on the wall shows it’s past eight, but it’s still sunny outside. The kitchen throbs with heat and the smell of rice, garlic, ginger and sesame oil. Inah’s got her nose buried in a book. Mom keeps glancing at the clock and gets up to adjust the flame under the stainless pot of the birthday seaweed soup.

  When Mom comes back to the table, Inah puts down the book and spies on Mom’s face.

  “Did your father say anything this morning?” Mom asks us.

  “Like what?”

  “Like he’s going out to dinner with someone?”

  “No. You mean Dad doesn’t know it’s his birthday? You didn’t tell him, Mom?”

  “I forgot,” she says.

  After a while, restless, I get up and scrub the sink clean with a new Brillo pad. Outside the kitchen windows, dusk is slowly spreading its blue sheath. The low peony trees look like bl
ack umbrellas. The predatory bamboo makes a thick, shaggy, unruly grove by the wooden fence. And in the barrels along the flagstone path, white and pink and deep purple petunias—their colors almost livid in the light of the dusk—are blooming profusely, cascading down the sides of the barrels. Over the years, the Korean Zen garden Dad once envisioned has gone through some modifications.

  I remember how excited Dad was the day the peonies he had ordered from a catalogue arrived from a farm in Connecticut. Just in time for fall planting. It didn’t seem to matter that the three-year-old, bare-rooted plants had come from China. Dad was like a child who opened his first ever Christmas toy. He couldn’t wait. That evening, he went out and dug up big holes and planted them. In the spring, he spent hours and hours in the backyard, squatting like a Korean farmer, mulching and improving the soil and also laying down the flagstone path. He coddled them like babies and constantly talked about peony blossoms as a man talks about a beautiful woman he couldn’t hope to attain. He would read up on everything about them, looking them up in his English-Korean dictionary, and in his spiraled mini notebook would write down all the characteristics and the fancy names of Chinese peonies: Taoist Stove Filled with the Pills of Immortality; Coiled Dragon in the Mist Grasping a Purple Pearl; and Purple of the Sung Dynasty.

  It took two springs before the peonies decided to send out blooms and reward Dad. It was May. They seemed to bloom all at once, bursting out in luscious hues. Each petal as flawless as a piece of new-spun silk. Each blossom a perfection of beauty. Dad went out and bought oiled-paper umbrellas from a Chinese shop and kept the “thousand petal” blossoms shaded to prevent the colors from fading in the sun and being stained in the rain. Under the shading umbrellas, they looked like ravishing beauties coyly waiting for their lovers. They waited and waited until dusk and then floated away into the night, softly padding away. But the season of peony blossoms turned out to be so fleeting. After just two weeks or so, the best of them were all gone, and Dad quietly mourned their passing.