Translations of Beauty

by Mia Yun

  Soon after, May hurtles in, as though prompted by the rain, bringing with it a string of perfect dry spring days, filled with quiet, sunny afternoons. In the blue sky, winds push white clouds along. Time seems to stretch on and on like an elastic band. On afternoons like that, when our shabby stretch of Ash Avenue looks exactly like the spring when we moved here, it’s almost easy to believe that everything will be fine. Even without Dad. If there’s anything that still seems to miss his presence sorely, it is the backyard garden, where the peonies bloom and dip hardly noticed. New baby green bamboo shoots are coming up like crazy, pushing through the old, sickly yellow leaves that look like moth wings clinging tenaciously. In a couple of years, the bamboo will probably take over the whole area by the fences, and then it will be too late to do anything about it.

  It’s earlier than usual when Mom starts her six-day workweek at the travel agency. Inah, suffering from hay fever, pops red bean-sized Sudafed pills like M&M’s. I get fat on the steady diet of junk food Mom buys in excessive quantities at a new price club she regularly raids with Auntie Minnie with militant zeal (along with 42-roll packs of toilet paper and 36-roll packs of paper towels). In the bathroom mirror, my face starts to look like a fat white turnip. I am haunted by a vague fear that things are getting out of control, slowly racing to a crashing point.

  The only person who’s happy is Auntie Minnie. She’s got a boyfriend, a Bayside Italian who owns a small hair product distribution company. She met him at a trade show. (Remember she swore off men for good after her divorce?) So now she rarely comes around or stays over. When she remembers to call, she sounds ecstatically happy; she’s having the time of her life. Her boyfriend even took her to Atlantic City in a white stretch limo trimmed with light-bulbs. Imagine! She knows, too, that he is two-timing her with a young Hispanic divorcée and is leasing her a beauty salon somewhere in Jackson Heights. So what, she says. I am too old to let jealousy get in the way.

  One Saturday evening, she finally brings him over so Mom can check him out for her. Uncle Frankie, whom Auntie Minnie unabashedly introduces as “Prankie,” turns out to be a stereotyped-to-death Italian, prone to flashy gold chains and an open shirt. But Auntie Minnie matches him just so, with her own loud clothes and enough makeup “to paint a whole canvas by rolling her face over it,” as Mom puts it so tactfully. In Korean, of course.

  They end up staying hours. Joking and kidding each other, making fun of Bayside Italians and Flushing Koreans, telling jokes about the Mafia and Moonies, and roaring with their heads tilted back. Uncle Frankie keeps calling Auntie Minnie “Connie Chung,” as a compliment, of course, and she returns it, declaring, “He handsome or what? Like Alpha Chino!” And for some unfathomable reason, she keeps slapping him on the legs and arms as if she were trying a punching bag. The whole time, embarrassed and shocked, cringing and wincing, and trying not to break into a laughing fit, Mom and Inah and I sit there, catching flies with our open mouths. It’s the best time we have had in months.

  Then one day, just like that, Dad is back in Flushing. Inah and I are in the kitchen making ramyun for lunch the Saturday afternoon when the phone rings. We figure it’s Mom, and Inah picks up the phone: “Hello?!” Obviously it’s not her, because Inah spends the next long minute mostly silent, blurting out just a couple of barely audible nehs, yeses. She’s all flustered, and for a second, she even looks like she’s hyperventilating. Finally, she puts down the phone and slowly sinks into a chair, looking as if she has just been hit in the head with a sledgehammer. Her face is still flushed crimson red.

  “Don’t tell me. It’s Dad, isn’t it?” I ask. Inah nods slowly. “Was he calling from Chicago?” She shakes her head. “Then where was he calling from? Tell me!!”

  “Dad’s in Flushing,” she says. “He was calling from the pay phone at Woo Chon.” Woo Chon, the Cow Village, is a Korean restaurant on Kissena Boulevard. I can hardly believe it.

  As long as Dad stayed in Chicago, we somehow managed, holding our emotions in check. Maybe it was the distance that made it seem not quite real. But his sudden presence in Flushing is like a declaration of war.

  Mom erupts like a volcano that has been lying dormant. That evening, she comes home from work and raids all the dresser drawers and closets. Standing at the doorway, Inah and I watch as she ferrets out Dad’s things and flings them to the top of the bed. We don’t dare interfere.

  “Why did I ever marry your father? Why? I had to be crazy. Everyone tried to stop me and I didn’t listen!” Mom howls, flinging out Dad’s sweaters and pajamas. Sighing and drawing a quick cross across her chest, Inah mutters, “Here we go again!”

  Inah and I hardly listen as Mom narrates that old story we’ve heard dozens of times. Every time she’s mad at Dad, she brings it up. And each time, we notice, the story goes through a slight revision. She will conveniently omit some crucial facts. For example, she will never mention that it was she who doggedly pursued Dad, her high school art teacher. Nearly for five years after high school, all through college. Every day she used to go to Dad’s studio above an art-supply store in downtown Seoul, where he also lived between the time he quit his high school teaching job to devote his life to painting and the time he went back to teaching at a college. When he wasn’t in, she would wait for him for hours.

  She didn’t care then that Dad was an old bachelor with almost no prospects except a poor artist’s life. And each time, Dad would try to talk to her, repeatedly reminding her that he was not only much older than her but also an unreliable, penniless artist without a single practical bone in him. He’d tell her that marrying him meant that she would never live an easy, bourgeois life. (Dad thought she was a spoiled princess.) But Mom, so in love, didn’t care about any of that. Finally, he married her a year after she graduated from college and got a teaching job herself. It used to be a love-conquers-all story. Now she believes that the only love that remains true is unfulfilled or unrequited love.

  Dad used to joke and tell us, with a wink and a nod, that he had married Mom just to stop her from bothering him. If she hadn’t trapped him into a marriage, he would have been living a free and happy bachelor life in Korea. Sometimes, just to rile her up, he would hint that Mom hadn’t even been the prettiest of the girls he could have married. Moreover, there had been a very beautiful girl who’d liked him very much and had later become a famous movie star.A household name in Korea. Freshly jealous after all these years, Mom would grill him who. But he wouldn’t say it, making her fume for hours.

  “Do you know your grandmother hated your father at the very first sight of him? She threatened not to see me ever again if I married him. And did I listen? So young and stubborn?!” Inah and I look at each other and shrug.

  When the pile of Dad’s things grows to a mammoth mountain on the bed, Mom chucks his Made in China slippers, which have been sitting there all those months at the foot of the bed, into a garbage bin. She then stuffs all the clothes and books into black garbage bags and fruit boxes and stacks them up high against the wall in the foyer.

  THREE

  A few days later, in the early evening while Mom’s still at work, Inah and I pack some of Dad’s clothes, a mink blanket and his tubular Korean pillow stuffed with rice-chaffs into two black garbage bags. We pile and tie them to a cart and set out for the half-basement apartment where Dad is temporarily staying. We are not exactly worried that Mom will find out. We figure she has probably been hoping we do exactly that, since she is all contradiction and nothing but contradiction.

  When we reach the corner of Roosevelt, though, Inah suddenly gets cold feet. She isn’t sure, she says, if she can face Dad. I know just what it is, too. Inah, such a damn Puritan, can’t handle the fact that he has been living with another woman “mixing flesh” or “mixing bodies,” the Korean euphemism for sex. (It shocks you like nothing else when it occurs to you for the first time that your parents “sleep” together. Your parents are not supposed to be sexual beings who entertain sexual thoughts, much less practi
ce them.) It’s not easy for me, either, but I deal with it by trying to avoid dwelling on it. It’s such a gray area, anyway, and too much of a mystery, the worlds where adults navigate.

  I threaten Inah, telling her that either both of us go or neither goes. Does she think I enjoy doing this? In fact, I hate it as much as she does. But Inah looks so unbearably miserable. She twists and pulls at her fingers. But I don’t budge. We argue back and forth, standing on the crowded street corner with the cart parked between us.

  “Please, Yunah! Why can’t you go by yourself?”

  “Why should I? Like I am dying to see Dad? Are you going or not going? Just make up your mind.” Inah hisses, stamps her feet, wraps her head with her hands and squeezes it as if trying to stop it from exploding. “Shit, shit, shit!” she curses, kicking the curb. The air suddenly smells like smoky meat coming from the Korean restaurants. I stand there, thinking how I hate this time of day, just before the blue hour, when everything seems to overlap, and sounds and lights change their textures. I feel anxious, and I am furious at Inah.

  “Forget it. Let’s just go back home!” Grabbing at the cart handle, I spin around.

  “All right! You win! Are you happy now?!” Inah squeals and snatches the handle back from me. She then rants all the way, saying how she hates everyone and every damn thing.

  It feels really strange standing in front of Dad’s apartment door. Inah is sort of right. It’s probably a bad idea coming to see him like this. I don’t think he will be happy to see us this way, either. I take a big breath, pull away the storm door and knock. I am going to count to ten, I tell myself, and if there’s no answer by then, I will turn around and leave. I close my eyes and start counting, when I hear the door open. Startled, I look up and there’s Dad, standing right there in front of me. I feel all the blood rush up to my head. Dad finally seems to realize it’s me; his eyes go all dark. He looks as dismayed and as uncomfortable as I am.

  Standing there framed by the narrow basement doorway, Dad looks almost gaunt and exhausted, as if he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in ages. His bleary eyes sitting deep in the sockets are distant. And there is definitely an unfamiliar aura about him. An aura he acquired from another life that completely excluded us. I want to ask him why he did what he did. I want to ask him if he ever knew how we always thought him special and how we were so proud of him: for refusing to be molded and changed and fit; for staying so noble and high-minded despite a string of humble jobs he held to provide for us; for not becoming another Uncle Shin; for not wanting what everyone wants; for not grasping for the lowly and vulgar trophies of materialism.

  But I don’t ask him any of that. Instead, I quickly look away. It’s hard to look him in the eye. It’s so much harder than I expected. I feel as though it is me, it is us who have done something wrong and done him in. I glance back at Inah. She is standing at an angle, a few feet behind me, grinding at the cracked cement with the toe of her clunky black shoe. She has no idea how so unbelievably grateful I am to her for not having abandoned me to face him alone.

  Dad’s eyes slowly travel over to Inah. But she won’t look at him. She holds her face stubbornly averted. Dad drops his eyes, stares at the ground for a second. I remember Dad coming home on a snowy night from the hospital where Inah was staying after the accident. He sat down for the dinner Grandma had fixed him, and he broke down and wept, holding his face with his hands. Even though I was very young, I knew he was hurting so much. It was the only time I ever saw him cry.

  When Dad looks up again, his eyes are glassed over. With his brown and bony hand, Dad feels for his shirt pocket and takes out a cigarette pack. It’s empty, because Dad crumples it in his hand. They look like white ivory buttons, the knuckles rising sharply through his skin.

  “We brought you some of your things, Dad,” I say, pointing at the bags on the cart. I have almost forgotten them. Surprised, Dad stares at the bulging garbage bags. He looks perplexed. As if he couldn’t quite comprehend: his life lying there at his feet, reduced to two garbage bags. Dad slowly shakes his head. Then without saying anything, he rubs his stubbly chin. We all stand there, choking on the silence that sits like a fish bone caught in the throat.

  Finally, Dad asks if we have eaten yet. I am disappointed. It’s all Dad could think of to say after seven months of absence; if we have eaten yet.

  “You haven’t eaten yet? Dad will put these away and take you out to eat.” He takes the bags inside. He doesn’t ask us if we want to come in. That dark, small basement apartment is the only private space he owns in this world. The storm door bounces and shuts behind him with a subdued bang, shutting us out again.

  I turn around to Inah, standing behind me. Then, as if we read each other’s minds, Inah and I skip up the steps and start down the road. As fast as we can without running. It isn’t until we reach the corner of Union and Roosevelt that I look back to see Dad hurrying down in a dark blue Windbreaker I haven’t seen before. He catches up with us waiting at the light. Then, placing his hands on our shoulders, he gives our shoulders a squeeze. But I can’t stand it: the feel and warmth of his hand. The light changes, and Inah and I start across, leaving Dad standing there, his hands in the air, rejected.

  When we turn a corner, Inah launches into a loud wail. “Ung, ung …” She cries, bellowing shamelessly, like a child. I don’t even try to stop her. The light is turning bluish. I remember how we used to go for walks with Dad on a beautiful spring evening like this.

  FOUR

  My last night in Rome, across the small rickety table at an outdoor restaurant on Via del Lavatore, amused, I watch Inah. The way she sits forward with her sharp elbows planted on the table like an eager student, and the way she so assiduously studies the menu, which she holds in front of her like a big, important book. I know she’s comparing the prices and shopping for the best value for her money, pragmatic as always. (It’s one of those tourist traps Inah shuns like poison, but she lodged only the mildest protest-I told her it’s my treat.)

  After a long while, she finally closes the menu, having decided on risotto with squid ink, the most exotic-sounding dish. She looks ravenously hungry. There’s something endearing about her excited anticipation of food.

  “No anti-pasti? No?”Our waiter asks after we order. He’s gangly and as tall as a poplar tree and pale, more like a Northern Italian. “How about insalata?” He’s persistent. I shake my head and smile apologetically.

  “No problem,” he says, playfully shaking his head, and then suddenly emboldened, asks me whether I am Japanese. (He never looks at Inah, not even once, as though she is invisible.)

  “No, we’re Americans,” I reply.

  “Eh?” he says skeptically. He thinks I am pulling his leg. He casts a quick, scrutinizing glance at me and shrugs and walks away. Inah predicts he will more or less ignore us for the rest of the meal. I don’t quite get the logic, but it turns out she’s right on the mark.

  Food comes out fast, as if it is fetched from a conveyer belt. Inah’s risotto with squid ink is too fishy for my taste, but she gobbles it up. A disheveled Italian man with a guitar is making the rounds of the tables, soliciting requests but not being very successful. He then stops at the nearby table of an American family of four, and after a short, lively discussion, suddenly and improbably, launches into a spirited “Rocky Mountain High.” He has a terrible, jagged voice. Inah groans and says, “He can’t sing for shit.”

  “And, duh, he’s Italian,” I say. Inah pulls her head down and giggles. Seeing her giggle with such childish delight, I am again filled with remorse. I could have tried harder. I should have been more patient. I will never be able to take back all the terrible words I said to her. I will kick myself for months. But there’s no more time to make up for anything. Tomorrow I will have to leave her and fly back home. Just as I start feeling that I am finally succeeding in pulling her out of the shelter where she takes refuge.

  “Look at it this way, Yunah,” Inah says, as if she has read my mind. “
At least, from now on, you don’t have to be embarrassed if anyone asks you if you’ve been to Rome and seen the Spanish Steps, the Trevi, the Pantheon, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Well, who’s going to ask?” I know she’s trying to cheer me up.

  “You never know. A waitress at Dojo, for example.”

  “Yeah, right.” Ha, ha. “Just don’t forget the stuff you want me to take back home,” I remind her.

  “I will go get it in the morning.”

  “Fine. Just don’t make me miss my flight.”

  “Well, if you like, we can go get it after dinner,” Inah suggests unexpectedly. “It won’t take long. We’ll take a bus.”

  “Sure, why not,” I say, trying not to sound too surprised. The day we arrived in Rome, she left me at the hotel and went over to her place in Trastevere to pick up some clean clothes. I assumed I would leave without ever seeing her place.

  Inah is glad to leave before the man with the guitar makes his way to our table. We walk to Piazza Venezia and catch a bus just leaving for Trastevere. It rumbles across the bridge over the Tiber, which is surprisingly narrow and picturesque, and we are soon on Viale di Trastevere, a wide, bustling boulevard crowded with shops and stores housed in nondescript modern buildings. The change is so sudden and startling that it’s like crossing the East River from Manhattan to Long Island City.