Translations of Beauty

by Mia Yun

  “Unni, sit, sit down,” Auntie Minnie says forcefully. “I know what you think. You think I speak nonsense. I maybe not so educated like you, but I not so thick in the head. You look down on me, Unni, just like everyone else. Because I yang-gongjoo, GI bride. You no respect me. But how you come to America? How everyone come to America? Because of me, Unni. Me! GI bride. All relatives see me a ticket to America. But once they come here, they like to forget me. They no want other Koreans know I marry black GI. I, yang-gongjoo. They shamed. Just like you. Just like Uncle Sin. All you treat me no better than a tong gae, shit dog, on the street. I Korean but I no like Koreans. That why I don’t mind my son, my only son, Jason, think he black, not Korean! You know that?!” Auntie Minnie shoots Mom a truth-or-dare look. Mom is so upset that her face is crimson red.

  “What are you talking about? What does it have to do with anything? You’re drunk,” Mom says. Auntie Minnie puts her face into her hands and starts wailing.

  NINE

  Why?

  The night I learn that Dad is in Chicago, that’s the first question I ask myself. Why Chicago, of all places? I can’t conjure up even a single image; Chicago is a black hole in my imagination. Even Inah says that she knows more about Mars than about Chicago. Then I remember the Frank Sinatra song “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)”. When we used to live on Bowne Street, we’d go to Jessica Han’s for sleepovers, and her father, a Frank Sinatra fan, would always play his songs. I liked the “Chicago” song because it always made me feel like I was somewhere very exotic.

  That night, in Inah’s room, we pull out the World Atlas map and open it to Illinois State, where Chicago and its expanse, colored red, spread from the southwestern shore of intestinal Lake Michigan like a bleeding ulcer. We stare at it for a long, long time, as if by doing so we could force it to yield some kind of clue. (What kind of clue, we don’t yet know.) As though if we stared at it long enough, the map would transform itself into a live city with smells and sounds and people and buildings and streets and houses and cars, and reveal to us the exact spot where Dad is. As though if we studied it long enough, there would come a divine intervention, and we would solve the whole mystery.

  But staring at the map, no matter how long, doesn’t do it. So every night after dinner, Inah brings her college application forms and books downstairs with an excuse that it’s too cold in her room and sets up the low Korean lacquer table in front of the couch. Then she sits there on the floor, her elbows planted on the table and her eyes glued to the TV, channel surfing for all the weather updates.

  As it turns out, Chicago is in a siege. Blizzard-bound. The worst winter in a decade, they say. A low pressure, cold front closing in on Chicago like a great wall. Its jagged teeth sharp as barbed wire. One day, the temperature dips to fifty below zero with the windchill. Over the frozen Lake Michigan, snow and ice drift in a great, foggy mass like hot steam out of the spit-fire mouth of a dragon. It shows people bundled up like polar bears and their faces covered with ski masks. Walking doubled over. Struggling against drifting snow and wind. With a strange thrill and twisted elation, we gobble up the scenes on the screen. Staring at the shifting Day-Glo swirls on the weather map.

  Every night, shivering under the cold cover, waiting to get warm, I think of Dad trapped in blizzard-bound Chicago. Holed up in a cold, run-down apartment somewhere with “that woman.” Probably in some run-down section of the city. On a desolate street where cold shadows draw extra long at night. Isolated from the frozen, snowbound world outside. Living on love, on borrowed time. Money running out. Passion dissipating, I hope, as surely as hot water cools. Dad, lying awake night after night, unable to sleep. Outside, winds whining in high-pitched croaks. The pipes running through the thin walls, rattling and gasping, rattling and gasping all night, keeping him awake. His hard-won sleep only to be disturbed by dreams of us. And then, in that restless and uneasy hour just before dawn, Dad is awake again. Thinking a million thoughts. Wondering what he’s doing there. Far from home, in a strange city, in an unfamiliar room.

  I am so certain Dad is miserable. He has to be. So miserable, in fact, that he will soon be running back to New York. Leaving his affair behind him like a short-lived fever. But what if Dad never returned? What if our love for him or his love for us proved not to be enough to lure him back? Could our love for him substitute for whatever it was that had lured him away from us to begin with? And I have always assumed only rich people behaved that way. Rich, white people, real Americans, who live in glitzy Manhattan, where buildings are lit bright at night, like elaborate birthday cakes. Flushing isn’t America, even Dad himself began to say. It is a way station. A place to shake off the old dirt on immigrant shoes. A place of limbo. One foot there, the other here. Burdened only with duty. Old and new. Dad was supposed to endure, suppress and overcome life. He should have known better than to act on those selfish, ephemeral impulses and improbable passions.

  Every evening, I see them, immigrants like Dad, flooding Main Street. Released like so many eels out of an oil drum from the Number Seven train, the Orient Express, from Manhattan, our umbilical cord to America. Men on their way home, to their own section of the Orient, mapped with little Korea, India, China and the Middle East. Spices galore. Except to us, Dad is hardly distinguishable from them. Dad is just one more Asian face in the crowd, struggling to make his way in a new country.

  I don’t want to believe that love was the reason Dad walked out on us. For love doesn’t grow in a hideout, in the shadow. It feeds on the hottest sun. Love should be proud, unashamed. Isn’t that what the Bible says? Dad was just looking for proof that he still counted. That he was still capable of change, to stir things up a little. That he hadn’t become a paralyzed prisoner in America. Dad, who never seemed to find his way in the new country-or even seemed, at times, uninterested in finding his way-is simply lost and needs to find his way back. And he can’t even begin to do so until he’s completely lost. I hope and pray Dad gets completely and utterly lost in blizzard-bound Chicago. One day he will realize that he has nowhere to run and hide: Even in vast America, he lives in a tiny world. A-men!

  The week Mom’s church is holding a nightly poohung-whe, revival meeting, I snoop around and find Dad’s Chicago phone number in the kitchen drawer where she keeps grocery receipts, emergency candles and batteries. In Mom’s handwriting, it’s scribbled like a Morse code on a purple Post-it, folded in half.

  One night after she leaves, I go to the living room, where Inah has flung herself down on the couch with a book. Inah looks up at the Post-it I display like a war trophy, and says she won’t tell Mom if I called.

  “You know the call will show up on the phone bill,” she informs me helpfully.

  “Like I don’t know. I am going out and find a pay phone. Wanna come?” Inah shakes her head, not even bothering to look up. I notice it’s The Travels of Marco Polo, the book she’s reading. She, too, wants to run away from Flushing. I guess she couldn’t run farther than to Marco Polo’s East.

  Outside, along Ash, the winter already has the old entrenched feel. The houses look squalid and gloomy. The sidewalks are still patched with old snow that has never had a chance to melt, and the pushed-up snow along the street stands like a frozen wall, its crest jagged-edged and crystallized like sugar. Behind steamed-up apartment windows, early Christmas lights, blurry and dull, lazily blink on and off. I remember how Dad always hated the Christmas season in America for all the commercial frenzy.

  At Kissena, I turn and walk down to the pay phone outside the Willow House, a Korean restaurant. But it’s missing the receiver, and all that is left is the metal wire hanging loose, like a severed umbilical cord. Then I remember seeing a pay phone outside the Pakistani newsstand at the corner of Roosevelt and Main. As I head toward Roosevelt, the wind picks up suddenly, and I race all the way to Main, cupping my ears and cursing at Inah.

  The corner with the newsstand is one of the grimiest and most crowded spots during the day, but it’s now completely desert
ed and in the dim light looks stripped down and desolate. I pick up the receiver and punch in the number on the Post-it. The fistful of quarters I slip in go down in a noisy clang.

  At the first ring, my heart starts racing like crazy. I am suddenly scared. What if Dad answers? What am I going to say? I am not even sure if I really want to talk to him. I haven’t really thought all this out. I frantically debate whether to hang up, but it’s too late, because I hear a soft click cutting off the ring.

  “Yeobo-se-yo?” “Hello?” It’s a woman’s voice, that voice on the phone. It’s a little tattered and throaty, and it’s like a question, her hello. My heart drops. She’s Dad’s lover.

  Say something, ask for Dad, stupid, I tell myself, but my tongue seems stuck at the throat. Just then, I hear what sounds like Dad’s voice in the background.

  “I don’t know who it is,” the woman’s voice says through crackling static. Cupping the mouthpiece, I turn away from the street to face the grimy newsstand window, where skin magazines are displayed with their covers facing out. One, Asian Beauties, catches my blurry eye. I stare at the picture of an “Asian” girl on her knees. She’s naked under a floral kimono, its front half open. I can even see she’s a little plump in the belly. Her glossy cherry lips parted halfway, she is staring out blankly with her dark brown eyes.

  A cold and hot shiver shoots through me. Strangely enough, until that very moment, I have never once wondered what Dad’s lover looks like. Her face, it has been, until then, just a blank oval. She isn’t real. Just a concept and an idea; “a woman like that,” as Mom calls her.

  “Ah, Yeobo-se-yo?” Dad’s low, gravelly voice washes over like a warm wave melting the frozen line. I suck in the frigid air, filling my lungs. My head spins and floats. I am squeezing the receiver so hard that my fingers throb, and my whole body shivers uncontrollably. I want to sit down and cry. Bellowing loudly like a baby. So it is all true. Dad living in another city with a woman, a perfect stranger to us.

  Shell-shocked and shivering, forgetting to hang up the phone, I stand, holding the receiver at my side. Across the street, outside a Chinese bakery, the winds pick up and skip by, carrying along bits of newspapers up the sidewalk. Over the elevated Long Island Rail Road track, a night train noisily rumbles past into the cold, black night.

  TEN

  Inah’s gone when I wake up in the morning. She has left a note on top of the bureau: a blue-lined notebook page folded into a square with two tails sticking out. I open it and read it in one breath:

  Yunah, I’m taking a six A.M. bus to Siena. I’ll be back tonight. And about last night, I was wrong. I am sorry. But it’s not like what you think. Not everything has to do with my face. Sure I am not happy about it and, as you said, I don’t know why it had to happen. But I’ve lived with it and know I’ll have to live with it. I accepted that long ago and I can only hope that you will, too. And I want you to know that I don’t intend to be a burden weighing everyone in the family down for the rest of my life. I must be useful for something and I am going to find out what that is. Until then, don’t try to rescue me or save me. What I need is time. There’s nothing you or Mom or Dad can do. Or anyone else for that matter. I want you to go on with your life. One day, maybe I will be able to catch up with you.

  Love, Inah

  I crumple the notebook page, dizzily filled with Inah’s loopy handwriting, and cry. I can’t shake off the image of her last night noiselessly weeping, standing by the bed.

  It’s almost noon when I force myself to go out. My head feels dull and heavy, the way it does after too much sun. At a cafe near Ponte Vecchio, I have a quick cup of cappuccino and buy a ready-made sandwich and a bottle of water and head for Piazzale Michelangelo. Without Inah, I am vulnerable and utterly lost. Everything seems all fuzzy, as though I am merely floating.

  To reach the piazzale by foot, you have to hike up the long, steep road along the Costa San Giorgio. The walk feels interminable under the midday sun that hardly moves, as if sewn onto the sky. But it’s worth it. The view from the piazzale is simply breathtaking, and immediately, I regret coming here without Inah. I remember it was on her must-see list, but instead we frittered away so much time fighting and fuming and being unhappy. And Inah would rather be alone. It’s preferable to her. She’d rather be the lonely figure moving about like a shadow among the crowds. Unspoken to. And if ever noticed, only for the wrong reasons. But I miss her in a way I never have before. Even her surly presence. It puzzles me how she has become someone I could love only when we’re apart. From a distance. When the distance is lost, the love turns into something else. Something petty, narrow and intolerable.

  I can only half finish the sandwich. Then I start a letter to Inah that I am not sure I’ll ever give to her:

  Inah, you’re in Siena as I write this. You were gonewhen I woke up in the morning and not surprisingly, Icried like nuts after reading the note you left. You don’tknow how sorry I am for all the things I said last nighteven though it was in anger. If only I could, I would takeback all the words and the hurt they must have caused.

  But as usual, it’s too late, and I am filled only withregret.

  I know you wanted a day alone without me (and Iagreed to give you some breathing room) but I wish I hadgone with you. If I had, we would be in Siena togetherright now, making another memory. Maybe not now butone day, probably old and decrepit, I am sure I would begrateful for that one more memory. What would we bedoing then?

  Inah, do you remember that gray morning in Venice? (I can’t believe how it already feels like so long ago.) We were walking down a moss-covered fondamenta on the way to see some obscure church, its name now I’ve forgotten. (It had a ceiling painting you wanted to see: The artist as he finished it was killed falling from the scaffolding; how morbid.) I remember it was like a vision from a dream: the sudden appearance of a gleaming black gondola on a narrow, picturesque canal. Framed in the arch of a stone bridge. The gondola’s stern was decorated with fresh white lilies. Remember how they were so brilliantly white against the gleaming black of the gondola? And how brilliantly white the starched shirts the gondoliers wore under their red, gold-brocaded vests? I never knew until then that white is such a lavishly beautiful color! That was the one time I wish I had a camera with me; it seemed memoryalone wasn’t enough.

  And you must remember the pretty young girl wholooked about seventeen in a simple ivory lace dress. Shewas sitting on a brocaded seat, next to a middle-agedman, stiff in a blue-gray suit. I assumed, not knowingany better, the man was courting the girl. But Inah, youpointed out how he looked much older than her. And Isaid, “That’s why he’s trying so hard to impress her. I bet.”

  Inah, you said it was disgusting. I still don’t know whatyou meant by that. The idea of an old man courting ayoung girl or my assumption.

  Anyway, the gondola glided down the canal and disappearedand we forgot all about it. Shortly afterward, wegot lost in the maze of narrow streets, and then afterwandering around a while, found ourselves at a piazzafacing an old, unassuming stone church. (I seem toremember it had a faded redbrick facade.) In the piazza, there was a large festive crowd of Italians, all dressed inwhat seemed their Sunday bests, happily milling about.

  We went inside the church, old but rather plain, and had aquick look around and came back out. By then, the crowdhad all converged by the canal. And I instantly recognizedthe gleaming black gondola with the white lilies. And thegirl in that simple, pretty ivory dress. She was beinghelped out of the gondola by the man in the blue-gray suit.

  After entrusting her white-gloved hand into his, carefullylifting the hems of her long dress, she stepped out onto thebank. The happy crowd cheered and clapped.

  You didn’t want to come in, so I left you outside andfollowed the girl, the blue-suited man and the stream ofguests into the church. I couldn’t have been more wrongabout the man and the girl. Once inside, I quickly put two

  and two together. You see, Inah, the girl in the ivory dresswas getting marri
ed that morning. And the man in theblue suit was the bride’s father escorting his daughter tothe church for her wedding. And at the foot of the stepsleading to the altar stood a nervous-looking, red-cheekedyoung man in a fresh haircut and black suit, watching thegirl being escorted up the church aisle by her father.

  When I came back out, it was drizzling. I found youstanding outside the door. The gondola and the gondolierswere gone and the canal was empty. The rainy piazzastood empty too. No trees. No chirping birds. For a while, we just stood there, silent and looking out at the slantedsilver ropes of rain. (Neither of us mentioned the girl inthe ivory dress or the man in the gray-blue suit.) I wasfeeling a little sad as I stood there next to you. I was wonderingwhether Dad would one day have the chance tohand you and me to the arms of men we are in love with.

  I wondered if you would ever have a chance to fall in loveand marry. I wondered if any man would love you as awoman. I wondered if I would marry if you didn’t. Iknow you hate sentimentality but those questions wereswirling inside my head as I stood there outside the churchthat morning.

  Do you want me to tell you, Inah, what I realized atthat moment? I realized that I was forever tethered to youas we were once tethered to Mom together through theumbilical cords. By fate and blood and love. And to behonest with you, it terrified me, the idea of being forevertethered to you.

  I guess what I am trying to say is that even thoughmost of the time we barely see beyond the fuzzy details oflife (we so easily lose perspective), now and then therecomes along a moment when you see for once so clearly

  that you can see right through your heart. I think it wasone of those moments. Because it also made me see howmuch I loved you and how that’s what matters most in theend. I was afraid but also sure that the rest will take careof itself.