Translations of Beauty

by Mia Yun

  I go back to the table and sit down. Inah complains of hunger pains. Mom repeats we aren’t eating without Dad. It’s his birthday. I look at Inah. I can tell she isn’t going to swing into action.

  “Dad might be at the kiwon,” I casually spill the beans. Inah angrily pinches me at the back.

  “What kiwon?” Mom wouldn’t have looked more surprised had I said “house of prostitution.” Although she looks more disappointed than upset. She knows it’s more than just a place to play a few games of badduk. Men who frequent the place are either old, lonely or out of jobs, and all have lots of idle time on their hands. Inah and I even code-named it the House of Lonely Men. It’s a small Korea, a refuge men seek from the outside world: America. To Mom these men are failures.

  “I didn’t say Dad’s there, Mom. I just thought he might be there, and if you want, I’ll go and look.” Mom doesn’t answer or look at me. Instead, she gets up and turns off the gas and walks out of the kitchen.

  “Are you coming?” I ask Inah. She just hisses. I go out to the foyer and slip into my rubber thongs. It is nearly dark outside but still muggy. I hurry down, making my thongs sing. The kiwon is on Union Street, across Northern Boulevard, and it’s at least a fifteen-minute fast walk.

  I am hot and almost out of breath by the time I reach Northern Boulevard. As I cross the street, I remember the Chinese girl I knew in sixth grade. Her grandfather got killed crossing the street at the very spot, hit by a car. Mom gave me a ten-dollar bill in a white envelope to take to school when we collected money because she didn’t have a father and her family couldn’t afford the funeral expenses. I thought ten dollars was way too much and debated about replacing it with a five-dollar bill. But in the end I didn’t, because I was afraid that I would go to hell when I died. Auntie Minnie and Mom always talked about going to hell.

  The stairwells of the kiwon building smell like hot spices of jambong from Mi Mi Hyang, the Korean-Chinese restaurant downstairs. It sends me into a sneezing fit. Outside the kiwon door upstairs, I hesitate a little before giving it a careful push. To my surprise, it gives in easily, and I slip inside. A yellow-faced man at the counter looks up from the newspaper. I stammer a little. I must have said that I’ve come to look for my father. I know it’s saying it in Korean that makes me feel ashamed. He nods and goes back to the paper.

  I look around the big, rectangular room, to which the fluorescent lights and thick cigarette smoke give a seedy, cavelike feel. Hesitantly, I head down the aisle. On the elevated floor along the wall, men sit on cushions, cross-legged, across yellow badduk tables, where black and white buttonlike stones make up quizzically beautiful patterns. The sounds of badduk stones hitting the boards echo through the room like errant hammering. To my relief, no one pays any attention to me. Halfway across the room, though, I suddenly realize something: I don’t want to see Dad here, slouched over the edge of the floor, observing a game. Not on his birthday. I turn around and quickly slip out of the kiwon. The man at the counter never looks up.

  FOUR

  Two months after his birthday, as October winds down, Dad goes AWOL. For years, that’s how we will refer to his affair as “Dad going AWOL.” As if it were a joke. Saying to each other, “Remember the time Dad went AWOL?” As if that way we can somehow wipe out the bad memory that will linger like a black spot in our vision or make it less hurtful.

  I don’t know if Inah and I could have ever guessed it. Dad just wasn’t someone who would have an affair. If there were clues, we never picked up on them. Everything was usual that morning. When I left for school, Dad was getting ready to leave for work just like any other morning. Although later I would remember smelling on him the Aramis aftershave when he walked into the kitchen that morning. Inah and I had chipped in and bought it for him the past Father’s Day, but he rarely wore it. That night, Dad didn’t come home, and Mom told us he was staying the night at the house of his friend whose mother had died. So we thought nothing of it. I wonder if Mom knew.

  When Dad went AWOL, things were getting better, too. At the end of the listless summer, after months out of a job, Dad started working again. He went to work for Uncle Shin, who owned an importing company and a wholesale store in Koreatown, Manhattan. We know working for Uncle Shin was something Dad had avoided as long as he could. He didn’t want a job handed to him. It was just somehow too easy. But there had been other reasons. Some things about Uncle Shin always irked and rankled Dad. Like his politics. Dad knew he couldn’t, without losing his temper, deal with him on a daily basis. He didn’t want to end up losing him, unable to separate the Uncle Shin he loved like a brother from the one he disliked: a proud Staten Island Republican and a generous campaign contributor, whose mantra was “in America, money is king”; who freely admitted that he despised the weak and thought the poor were lazy; whose business dealings often seemed, if not criminal, a little shady and just barely legal.

  Several years later, when the L.A. riot would break out, they would nearly have a falling out. They would have a heated argument in front of the TV, where surreal scenes of the riot splashed on the oversized screen in the den of Uncle Shin’s house: buildings going up in flame; rowdy, festive mobs looting the stores and beating motorists; and Korean business owners perching on the rooftops in military prone position with their machine guns and rifles. Uncle Shin would declare that under the same circumstances, he would do exactly the same thing the men on the rooftop were doing. He genuinely believed every man has a right to make a living without fear and, if it were needed, to protect his livelihood in any which way he could. Even with a machine gun.

  Dad would remind him of his early days in America as a wig peddler in Harlem, the story Uncle Shin often proudly rehashed. The fact that he once made a living off black people. So what, Uncle Shin would say. I didn’t steal. I didn’t live off welfare. I worked like a dog. I am not ashamed. I am proud. That day, Dad would end up calling him a capitalist pig. And he, accusing Dad of being a socialist and a communist and saying Dad didn’t deserve to live in America, enjoying its freedom. Dad, furious with him, would break his wooden chopsticks into pieces, bolt up and walk out of the room.

  But Dad seemed fine. In fact, after he went to work for him, Dad started spending a lot of time with Uncle Shin. Often at the end of the day, Dad would call home from Manhattan and tell Mom not to expect him to dinner as he was going out with Uncle Shin.

  Then one Friday night, not long after Dad had started working for him, Mom came in and woke me up. It was just past two in the morning. Almost two hours since Uncle Shin had called to let Mom know that he had just put Dad in a livery cab Koreans refer to as a “call taxi.” Dad should have been home long ago, Mom said. Something must have happened.

  On the way to our parents’ room downstairs with Mom, I went into Inah’s room and woke her up. She grumbled plenty but followed Mom and me downstairs. But as soon as we were in our parents’ room, she burrowed into Dad’s side of the bed and went right back to sleep. Mom, unable to sit still, kept pacing around the room.

  I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember is jumping up at the loud ringing of the doorbell. Inah catapulted out of the bed, and we hurried to the door after Mom. At the door, it wasn’t Dad we found, though, but a skinny, bespectacled Korean man we had never seen before. He wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt, dark blue slacks, and brown leather sandals over his sockless feet. He bowed to Mom and, pointing at a dark limo parked down at the curb, said he had a certain Mr. Hong in the car. We knew right away it was Dad. As we followed him out, he told Mom how he had been driving Dad around Flushing for over an hour. Apparently, Dad had refused to tell him where he lived. Every time he’d asked him for his address, Dad would holler, “Ah, uncle, I told you to take me to Seoul, Korea. You come from Korea. You must know how to get there, don’t you?” Eventually, Dad had gotten tired of the game.

  We found Dad sitting slouched in the plush backseat of the Lincoln. He had never been a big drinker, and he wouldn’t touch the h
ard stuff. With Uncle Shin, though, you never knew. Uncle Shin was known to think nothing of ordering a whole bottle of Rémy Martin or Johnnie Walker Black. And often Korean men drink as if it were a game of daring, an endurance test. Glass to glass. And no one was more Korean than Uncle Shin. Making money, having fun, there was no difference to him. He worked on both very hard.

  “Ah, yeobo,” Dad blared, peering at Mom through his bleary eyes. “I had a couple of drinks, is that all right?”

  “Only a couple and you can’t even remember where you live,” Mom said sharply. Even though Dad was much older, Mom would sometimes treat him like a child, chiding and cajoling. It was her way of letting him get away with his gaffe.

  Dad looked at us and said, “Oh, you’re all still up!”

  He wouldn’t let us help him. Instead, he pulled himself out of the car and stood on his wobbly legs. He apologized to the driver and saluted him in military style. And then, as we helped him up the steps, he launched into the Korean anthem: “Until the water of the East Sea dries up and the Mount of Baekdoo wears off….” Inah and I giggled. Mom said he was going to wake up all the neighbors.

  When we went down to the kitchen the next morning, Mom was making boog-uh-gook, dried fish soup, for Dad’s hangover. Obviously, he was still in bed. On the kitchen counter, we noticed a fancy “room salon” matchbook. The black laminated cover showed a picture of a woman in silver silhouette holding a red-cherry-topped martini glass.

  “Mom, where’s this from?” Inah asked, holding it up. Mom said it had fallen out of Dad’s shirt pocket while she’d been helping him undress. We knew it was more likely that Mom had searched all of his pockets.

  “Dad went to a room salon last night?” I asked.

  “Uncle Shin must have taken him. Your father can’t afford a place like that.”

  “So, what’s a room salon anyway?” Inah asked innocently.

  “With a name like that, what do you think?” Mom said. “Kaya, House of the Night!”

  FIVE

  Dad’s absence is so palpable, that’s all we seem to notice somehow. In fact, Dad in his absence dominates our life at home. All over the house, we keep stumbling across the visible and invisible traces he left behind. Like his shed skin. His empty seat at the dining table, his favorite pair of white Sperry Top-Siders sitting in the corner of the foyer, the white canvas stiffening and yellowing, his toothbrush with splayed bristles poking out of the holder at the bathroom sink, his frayed blue terry-cloth bathrobe hanging on the hook of the bathroom door and his gardening book sitting on top of the hamper, open and facedown. They remain exactly where they were the day Dad went AWOL. Untouched and unmoved. We just go around and around them, as the void grows and grows, stealthily, and steadily like a spot of mildew.

  Now every night after dinner, after the dishes are done, Mom locks the doors and turns off the lights, and we go scattering around the house to our separate rooms. For the rest of the night, the house sits all quiet except for the sound of the refrigerator humming and burring. No longer the muffled sounds of our parents talking downstairs, the scuffing sound of Dad’s slippered feet down the hall to the bathroom or the kitchen storm door closing with a soft click as he goes out to the backyard to have a cigarette.

  And for days and days, waking up in the morning, it’s the first thing I listen for—Dad in the backyard and the familiar sounds of morning: the water can clinking and clanking as it’s being filled with water; Dad clearing his throat and his feet scraping the flagstone path. The sounds of Dad enjoying the quiet morning hour, his hour, before the whole house wakes up, converging into the kitchen for a hurried breakfast, colliding in the hallways and at bathroom doors, with his hands on his back, strolling and pausing to look up at the sky and bending down to pinch off the withered leaves. But everything’s still, and I remember that Dad is no longer here. It always makes me a little sick in the stomach.

  Not surprisingly, Inah, the geek and the prude, is in a state of deep, deep shock. Home from school, she pads around the house, moping and sulking and looking funereal. Whatever thoughts she may have, they sprout and wither in her own head, never expressed. I can’t even wring a fight out of her; her interest soon flags. Instead, it’s at Mom and at her moods that all of her sensory antennas are now aimed.

  Inevitably, Inah and I pick up all the sordid details of Dad’s affair. Whenever Mom’s on the phone, there we are eavesdropping on her, lurking in the hallway outside the kitchen, shushing and glaring at each other. That’s how we learn that Dad’s lover used to manage one of the “room salons,” expensive “hostess bars,” in Manhattan, where Uncle Shin used to take him on their nights out on the town. On the phone, Mom invariably and disparagingly refers to her as “that madame” or “a woman like that!” Gritting teeth. Sounding hateful. Apparently that’s what goads Mom most—that Dad got himself involved with “a woman like that.” As if she wouldn’t feel half as bad had Dad’s lover been a rocket scientist or a suburban soccer mom with a family van full of screaming kids instead. But at least, as Auntie Minnie points out, Dad didn’t run off with one of those young hostesses they call young-gyes, spring chickens.

  In front of us, though, Mom tries not to let on, pretending everything is fine. She doesn’t once mention or bring up Dad’s affair. But she can’t eat. At dinner, oblivious of us floating anxious and furtive glances, she sits there pushing the rice around and around in the bowl with her thin, slippery stainless chopsticks, endlessly counting and recounting the grains. Struggling to contain the anger, roiling, bubbling and percolating noisily inside her, threatening to spill out at any moment.

  This goes on for days, until one night I am more than ready to confront her. But it doesn’t look too promising. At the dinner table, she doesn’t say a word. She scoops the rice into the bean sprout soup and then puts down her spoon as if it weighed too much for her.

  “Mom, you not eating?” I say, exasperated.

  “I can’t eat,” she says, getting up. “The rice tastes like pieces of stone.” She then quickly gathers her rice bowl, spoon and chopsticks and carries them to the sink. Inah freezes up and then, looking helpless and aghast, watches Mom standing at the sink, motionless like a statue, letting the water run as if waiting for her anger to be washed away, down the drain.

  Springing to my feet, I nudge Inah with my elbow. Reluctantly, she peels her butt off the chair and makes a face as if it hurts. We stack up all the dirty plates, carry them to the sink and stand crowding around Mom.

  “Mom, we’ll do the dishes,” I say. But she won’t even look at us. She just snatches them away from our hands.

  “Mom, please!”

  “Don’t worry about the dirty dishes and go to your room and study. Both of you!” she yells, her voice bursting with anger. Nonplused, we return to the table and plop back down. Inah leans over her arms and chews her thumbnail, staring into space. It’s been getting dark earlier. Outside the light-reflected kitchen window, the night seems coal-black and without boundaries. The kitchen feels like an airless vacuum.

  Mom finally finishes loading the dishwasher and pushes the Start button. But she doesn’t come back to sit down with us as I hoped. Instead, she slams open all the cupboard doors. Inah looks at me with that here-we-go-again look. Whenever Mom’s upset, she cleans, storming through the house. She will raid the cupboards and drag out perfectly clean pots and pans, and spends hours scrubbing them until they are as spotless and shiny as mirrors. That’s her way of dealing with anger. By cleaning.

  Mom stares into the cupboards and walks back to the sink and just stands there with her back obstinately to the world. I get up, walk over to the sink, shut off the faucet and stop the dishwasher. Mom turns and looks at me, a little surprised. Then, she angrily turns the water back on and picks up the Brillo pad.

  “Mom?!”

  “What?!”

  “How long are we going to live like this? Are we ever going to talk about it?”

  “Talk about what?” Mom burns me with s
uch a withering look that I shrink like a dry leaf tossed into a flame.

  “It’s not like we don’t know,” I mumble.

  “So what?! It doesn’t concern you,” Mom snaps.

  “How can you say that? Don’t we at least have a right to hear it from you?” Mom drops the frying pan into the sink. Soap bubbles float up in white clumps. I look over at Inah. She is pissed off. She glares at me, bunching up her eyelids in yanking pleats. I realize I have bitten off more than I can chew, and I have no idea how I am going to patch things back together.

  “You American kids always talk and talk and talk about your rights!” howls Mom. “You have no right to shame your parents!” I am dumbstruck. I have never thought about it that way. Mom looks as though she is about to break down and weep, but she quickly steels herself. I know I should stop right there, but I have to push my luck.

  “Mom, I’m not trying to do anything,” I venture cautiously. “I just want to know what we are going to do about it.”

  “Who’s we?” asks Mom. Her eyes are furious. “Since when are you so concerned about your parents? Your father and I fed you, clothed you and sent you to school. Isn’t that enough? Go to your room. You’re not going to do anything about it!” What she says doesn’t make any sense to me. No logic to it at all. Mom angrily pulls off her rubber gloves, shuts the faucet and walks out of the kitchen. I stand, a little flabbergasted. Inah kicks her feet and noisily pushes her chair back.

  “Why did you have to bring it up?” Inah looks at me with murder in her eyes. “Thanks a bunch for the wonderful evening!” She marches out of the kitchen.