by Mia Yun
“But why shouldn’t Inah go to Harvard or Yale if she can?” Mom would ask, truly perplexed whenever I tried to convince her that Inah was making the right choice; she should be proud instead of being so upset. Inah may be stubborn, but she’s smart and thinks for herself. It was Inah who was going to college, after all, and Mom should let her make the choice.
“Mom, not everyone can or should go to Harvard or Yale! They could ruin you, don’t you know that?” I once said, exasperated, and Mom kind of looked at me as though I was trying to put one over on her. “And Mom, attending Harvard or Yale no longer carries such a cachet. As it is, Harvard Square, I’ve heard, is overrun with Korean kids. There are enough of them literally to form a whole new tribe. And you know the types, Mom, the Korean kids who go to Ivy League schools. They come out all the same, as if out of cookie cutters. They all want to become doctors, lawyers and investment bankers, as if there aren’t enough of them already. And then they marry, have kids and move to suburban homes with lawns and two-car garages. They become Republicans and Christians with hearts that they rarely use. They live selfish lives. It’s not for Inah. And it’s not the kind of life she wants to live. Don’t you want what’s best for her? I know you do. Just let her make her own choice.” Mom, never into irony, was too caught up in it to take my tongue-in-cheek comments with a grain of salt. She didn’t think it was funny at all. She said we were all turning out just like Dad. Idealistic. One by one, we all disappoint her.
For a change, Inah was positively impressed by my performance. She thought it was one of my best Saturday-night rants ever, and she even grilled me about where I lifted those lines from. I was a little proud of myself. I felt I had finally risen to the occasion.
We slowly trace our way back to the Blair Arch. Mom stops and looks around one more time, as if she can’t accept the fact that all of this will be wasted on other kids. She turns to me and asks, “Yunah, what do you think? Isn’t it so nice?!”
“Uh, very,” I mumble, avoiding her searching eyes. I can tell she’s still treading the water of hope. She’s even wondering whether she has been barking up the wrong tree. Maybe, after all, I, not Inah, just might fulfill her “Ivy League” dream. There’s still hope—I have another year to decide, as Inah skipped a grade ahead of me. It’s sad to think how gladly Mom will sell the house to pay for it, too. But why not? Weren’t we the reason our parents came to America? Even though for her and Dad it meant starting all over again at the bottom. Eager to transform themselves into ladders for us to trample on with our feet to reach the sky. And they would consider it a privilege and an honor, not a sacrifice. And whenever it became tough going, Mom reminded herself that Confucius’s mother had moved twelve times for her son’s education. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, she’d tell us, more to convince herself than us, but remember there were no jets or trains or buses or cars in those days. She probably heaped everything on a cart or a donkey and traveled for days. Through torrential rain, blinding blizzards, mud slides, flooded roads, swollen rivers and whatnot. Mom stubbornly refuses to believe that we don’t want to be burdened with that kind of epic sacrifice.
We pass through the arch and cross the street to Palmer Square, empty and quiet except for birds whistling in thin, clear notes from the trees and a half dozen scraggly pigeons cooing about. Through the rain drifting down in fine sheets of mist, streetlamps sputter on like green liquid moons, and the windows of the elegant shops at the square bloom in warm orange glows. The few people we see on the street all look as though they have stepped out of the pages of L.L. Bean catalogues. They seem exotic, breezy, self-absorbed and casually territorial, and there is an air of entitlement about them. This is their world. So orderly, so pristine and so cold. I just can’t place Inah or myself into this neat, too neat picture. Inah would never fit in. And I know I would feel like a phony.
We wander down Witherspoon, narrow and sloping away, carrying its quaint old buildings into a wall of rain fog below. You can tell it’s not Flushing just from the absence of the harsh fluorescent lights, I tell Inah, nudging her at the elbow, and she simply snorts. Mom says, it’s clean. We turn around and walk back up the street, past a cafe. Dad asks if we’d like coffee before heading home. Mom looks at us, not wanting to be the one to nix the idea. At least not today.
Sitting with my parents and Inah at a tiny round table inside the warm cafe, I know I will always remember the afternoon here: the fragrance of the hot cappuccino frosted with steamed milk in the yellow plastic cup; the sad coffee ring in Mom’s thick white china mug, where dark American coffee sits, getting cold; Mom and Dad, sitting across from us, together yet separate. All these years we have rarely had a moment like this. As family. Mom was always busy. She had no time for frivolous things. Even on weekends, she always had her church to go to, home visits to make, laundry to do and grocery shopping to go and kimchi to make. It was always just Dad and Inah and I when we went to the Catskills, Bear Mountain, the Poconos and Harriman State Park.Mom will never know what’s it’s like: to be driving on a winding road that reveals new scenery at each bend; passing a small, quiet village with a fire station where an American flag flew on top of a pole; hiking up a steep mountain road in the Catskills to reach a waterfall; discovering an old, stained Korean doll at an antique shop in the Poconos; huffing along the musty hiking trails in the woods, marked by ribbons tied on tree branches. She doesn’t share with us the memory of the textures of the soft, electric green moss on the trunks of fallen trees, or of the dark blue summer evening at Blue Mountain Lake outside the closed general store where our childhood came to an end.
And Dad, who always tried to replicate for us his boyhood experiences in Korea, where he grew up wandering about the fields and hills, chasing dragonflies and locusts and picking wild berries, who wanted us so much to experience the kind of wonder and joy he had felt in nature—getting so excited detecting a flickering sense of recognition in us—always seemed to end up frustrated for not quite being able to explain the intangible and undefinable yearning he felt; now he sits here looking so somber, his hair going gray, feeling excluded and left behind.
It’s sad but true that Mom and Dad will never, ever, be part of this America. After the cup of coffee, they will go back to their old life in Flushing, where wounds are still fresh and all the relics of their struggling immigrant life are waiting to reclaim them. It is for Inah and it is for me that a new world waits. Inah, even with her scarred face, will have chances to forge a life no matter how difficult it may turn out to be: in the middle of what Mom calls “real America,” if only unconsciously meaning “white America.” Mom wishes that we dissolve into that white America, that we fit in. Mom thinks this will happen if we go to the best schools, if we speak English better than Americans. But that’s not enough, we already know that. Hasn’t Inah already started on a path that will never make Mom happy?
SIX
Auntie Minnie, renting a beach house on Long Beach Island with Uncle Frankie for the summer, calls and invites us down, saying Mom and Dad need to spend time together without us. Of course Inah and I say yes immediately. We have no idea where Long Beach Island is except that it’s somewhere off the Jersey shore. But we couldn’t care less. The effects of Dad’s affair are still lingering like a long, bad cold, and we feel ready to go anywhere, even if it is to Timbuktu. Just to get away from home.
Inah and I pool our savings and scout what Inah calls “the Third World aisles” at Woolworth’s and Caldor’s on Roosevelt Avenue, stocked mostly with cheap and flimsy Made in China things. We pick up one-piece swimsuits, clear plastic beach sandals, straw visors and suntan lotions, all on a summer blowout sale. And then we go to the library and take out a whole stack of books to take with us, salivating at the prospect of spending days on the beach with them.
But Inah wholeheartedly hates it, this thoroughly middle-class beach town, although it is probably no better or worse than the other zillion ragged beach towns dotting the Jersey shoreline. It’s true that t
here’s not a whole lot to do here (except to lie on the beach all day, being roasted in the sun) or places to go without a car. There’s the town’s main drag, a sandy road running lackadaisically more or less parallel to the shore, its sidewalk lined with a ragtag of salt-eaten, sun-faded, single-story commercial buildings facing the ocean. On the ocean side of the road, looking out to the beach, about a dozen or so boxlike beach houses stand on dark wooden stilts, like old hobbled birds perching on badly gangrened legs.
And for some weird reason, they have more blue Ford pickups here than any place on earth. On heat-stunted afternoons when Inah and I walk up the beach and wait to cross the street for ice-cream cones, they come up the sandy road toward the intersection, where the town’s only traffic lights hang, swaying in the sea breeze. They are almost always driven by sun-cooked white men (with optional baseball caps) carrying plastic coolers and fishing gear in the flatbed back. And it’s the summer everyone’s in the Asbury Park state of mind, because their car radios are always blasting Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Every time a pickup passes us by, we hear drumbeats and electric guitar pouncing and pouncing, momentarily drowning out the quiet of the heat-dazed afternoon. We feel the damp, salty sea air pulsate and vibrate and ring, and hear Bruce Springsteen’s tattered throat spitting out words like clumps of blood: “Got in a little home town jam / So they put a rifle in my hand / Sent me off to a foreign land / To go and kill the yellow man….”
Then, just because we look as conspicuous as two sea gulls on a mountain road—two yellow girls in bikini tops and shorts waiting to cross the street—the “jerks” always holler through the blasting sounds of music, “Agghhhhh!” Inah, unable to resist it, holds up her hand and gives them the finger as they make a showy, ear-splitting, screechy left turn and disappear toward the bay. Later, though, crossing the street, Inah bitches and blames me for asking for it by parading around in short-shorts or hot pants, with my white buns peeking out in half moons.
“Here, give me your tough-shit card, Inah, and I’ll punch it for you, OK?” Fuming and slapping her heat-stretched plastic sandals, Inah tears down the street, past Bamboo Garden, the tacky Chinese restaurant, a bar with a pitch-black interior, a deli, a pizzeria, a drugstore and a check-cashing place. And I feel inexplicably sad.
But then, Inah and I are sad all the time. Even here, far from home. Especially around dawn, when the angry, constant roar from the sea pulls us out of comatose sleep. Half-awake, we lie in our beds under the trundling ceiling fan for what feels like hours. Listening to the constantly churning and crashing sea and watching the pockets of night linger in gray and blue outside the windows. Submerged in vague despair that feels more like sorrow. When we’ve had enough, we stumble out of bed, groggy and swollen and heavy from too much sun from the day before. We throw on the still damp bathing suits under big T-shirts and toss the suntan lotion bottles, books, the Walkman and beach towels into the straw bag, and slip out of the house, down the rickety steps to escape to the beach.
It’s always subdued, the early-morning walk to the beach. Especially those mornings after we heard, not by choice, through the flimsy wall, Auntie Minnie and Uncle Frankie make love in the next room. The muffled sounds of their grunts and moans will follow us to the beach like the smell of fish that lingers on your fingers long after you touch it. We trudge along in silence all the way to the empty morning beach, lying in long, yellow, rippled sheets, gilded by the sumptuous morning light. Vaguely feeling doomed. Our heads all messed up with Dad’s affair and the strange things adults do. So casually and negligently.
As a rule, Inah and I never talk about the affair (how would we find the beginning of the thread?), but we’re thinking about it all the time. Helplessly. Wishing we didn’t know so much: all the latest sordid details we eagerly snatched up from the kitchen hallway, wincing and nail-biting, as they passed from Mom’s venomous tongue to Auntie Minnie’s pricked-up ears.
That’s how we know that Dad’s lover is back in New York and has been coming around to Uncle Shin’s company, trying to see Dad. One morning, to his dismay, Dad found her waiting for him at the entrance of his office building. “Wearing a low-cut, slinky gray silk dress and high heels,” according to Mom. Imagine! She got into the elevator with him and followed him upstairs to the office. Uncle Shin tried to escort her out quietly, but she refused to leave, saying how she wasn’t going to be shooed away “like a leper!” In the end, thick-set Uncle Shin had to hustle her out, literally pushing her back as she yelled and spat out strings of curses over his shoulder to Dad.
“That woman” was out to embarrass Dad in front of everyone, Mom said indignantly, spitting out each word with a tongue of fire. Well, he deserves it. What did he expect, getting himself involved with “a woman like that”? If he thought he’d escape from it unscathed, he’s a fool. Swallow it when it’s sweet and spit it out when it’s bitter? It’s good for him to be humiliated a little. He will think twice before he does this kind of thing again. That’s what Mom said, who isn’t a Christian for nothing.
What did Dad do while all this went on? While she shouted that she wasn’t going to go away quietly and accused him of being a liar and worse? In the office full of eyes and ears. Did he sit slumped behind his scratched steel desk, its cracked, bubbly Formica top crowded with cheap imitation jewelry samples from Korea and China? Mortified and shamed and, worst of all, his face lost? Suffering the indignity? Hating himself? Feeling like a coward? Surrounded with such ugliness. Frozen in the flood of greenish fluorescent light. Unable to escape. Dad must have closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself a Buddha sitting on top of a burning pyre in self-immolation. It, too, shall pass, for life is a mere passing of wind. But he couldn’t have blocked out the curse-ridden threats issuing from his lover’s painted mouth. We know that in Korean, they would have sounded so much worse, so biting and potent.
Mom’s spiteful, unhappy voice drums in our heads as we lie on the sun-crushed beach, the coarse sand, the color of orange squash in the sunlight, where children play with beach balls sectioned in bright red, blue, yellow and white, and all we can do is just try to stay afloat in a dreamlike state. Gazing out through squinty eyes to the hazy horizon lying placidly far, far away, dwarfed by the immense, monotonous, drowsy summer sky. Or just lying about being roasted and pricked by hot needle-pin rays of the sun. Carrying on long and confused and separate conversations in our heads. Trying to shut out the noisy thoughts of the other. Trying again and again not to dwell on things, not to feel the sadness and the dull, hot pain inside that stays on like a low-grade fever. Feeling stuck in the ugly beach town and the ugly beach house with Auntie Minnie and Uncle Frankie but not wanting to go back home, either.
Sometimes, it takes all my energy just to stay still on the damp and sandy beach towel, to keep the mind blank. But it’s impossible to shake off the feeling of being lost in a still mass of fog. It’s as though we are just waiting for it to clear up so that we can see clearly for once.
When the noise inside her head gets to be too much, Inah takes out the Walkman, greasy with finger smudges, and listens to loud music through the earphones. I don’t know why, but the steady and monotonous and repetitious beat of the music—as persistent as the sounds of the sea—that comes off her Walkman depresses me even more. To drown out the noise, I close my eyes and slowly recite “Sunflower Sutra” in my head, over and over again, hoping that in time it will carry me to the closest possible state of Nirvana.
Then around noon, Uncle Frankie and Auntie Minnie come down to the beach, carrying their collapsible beach chairs and the sweating red plastic jug. All of a sudden, it’s a flurry of activity and a carnival of smell: suntan lotion, perfume and cigarette smoke mixing in the salty sea breezes. Out of her pink straw beach bag, Auntie Minnie pulls out our lunch in brown bags: peanut butter and banana sandwiches on stale white bread, and bags of potato chips and sweating grapes.
Now and then, after lunch, Inah lets Uncle Frankie cajole her into going
for a walk. Auntie Minnie and I follow them with our eyes as they grow smaller and smaller up the shimmering beach among the crowd of sunbathers, beach towels, parasols and chairs. After a while, Auntie Minnie will turn to me mindlessly building up and breaking up a sand dune with my hands, and ask me how I am doing.
“OK, I guess.”
“OK, I guess,” she repeats, to let me know that she knows I am being less than honest.
Because we dread going back to the house, we stay behind on the beach and linger until the winds pick up and the plaintive summer sky starts churning in apricot and peach and the clouds turn yellow and sulphur and violet. Inah’s mood always progresses from bad to worse then. We bicker over stupid little things like who will carry what. Then, fueled by sudden, stupid rage, Inah storms off, racing across the emptied-out beach, where the sunlight is intense and yellow and speckled like gold. Carelessly dragging the damp, striped beach towels along the sand, and recklessly swinging the red plastic jug half-filled with the warm Orangeade diluted by the melted ice to the color of piss. Kicking up a sandstorm with the heels of her bare feet. Bracing against the syrup-textured sea wind.
“Inah!” Struggling after her, I scream and curse in full throat for making me carry all the chairs. “Wait! Asshole.” Ignoring my howls and hisses, Inah climbs up the sand dune and down and is gone. And I feel like crumpling the whole world with my hands. Overcome by inexplicable anger and helpless despair, I hate everything. The beach house with the flimsy walls and dime-store furniture with cigarette burns and nicks and scratches, where we lounge about on the itchy polyester, gray-and-peach “Comfort Inn” couch; sleep on the lumpy mattresses that hold the smell of all the people who passed through hot summer after hot summer; eat and drink out of the cheap plastic bowls and cracked plates and chipped enamel coffee mugs kept inside the moldy, musty cupboards; and take showers in the slimy stall crawling with black dots of mildew.