When the chipping sound stopped, Mother appeared at the door with two chunks of ice and gave them to us. The chunk was so cold in my hand that I kept switching it from one hand to the other. I bit off a small piece, and the ice was so cold on my teeth that they hurt.
The dark-haired soldier drank from his glass of lemonade. Sa rolled around clumsily on the patio and fell again, bumping into the soldier’s legs. As the soldier tried to haul Sa onto his feet, some of the lemonade spilled from his glass and left a wet spot on his trousers.
Mother put her hands on my shoulders. She patted me on the head and looked into my eyes.
“Take Sa down the street to the sidewalk,” she said. “And practice riding the skates.” She gave me some money. “You can buy a drink from the vendors when you’re both thirsty.”
Sa held onto my arm to keep himself steady as he stepped off the patio, and I pushed and pulled him up the alley and out into the street. I looked back down the tunnel of the alley, toward the patio and the hammock. Mother and the soldier had disappeared into the bungalow.
It didn’t take us long to learn how to roll around on the skates without falling down. We took turns skating and chasing each other down the sidewalk and the hard-packed dirt of the street. It was so hot that we skated only in the shaded sections of the sidewalk. The streets were quiet while everyone took an afternoon nap, so we skated back and forth down the whole length of the sidewalk. We started out slowly and then we skated faster. The ball bearings in the wheels hissed. We kicked our feet behind us, pushed ourselves forward, and felt the wind of speed against our cheeks.
We skated until we were thirsty and then we went to the vendors. We stood by as the vendor crushed sugarcane for our drinks by drawing the stalks through two wooden rollers. While we waited, he cut off two small slices and gave them to us to chew on.
When we were tired from the sun and the skating, we headed back to the alley. The door to the bungalow was shut. I had on the roller skates, stepped onto the patio, and skated to the door. I tried to open it, pulling and yanking on the doorknob, but it was locked. I heard my mother’s voice whispering inside. I pounded on the door with my fists.
“Let us in,” I said. “We’re home.”
No one answered. No one came to the door. I pounded harder, and as I slammed my fist again, the skates kicked out from under me. I stuck my arm out straight to cushion my fall. When my hand hit the cement, a sharp pain shot up from my elbow. I screamed. Sa pounded on the door, shouting, “Come out! Dung broke his arm!”
The door opened, and Mother came out. She was pulling her shirt over her pants and she looked down at me while I cradled the injured elbow with my other arm.
“What did you do?” she said. Her client stood behind her. The pain in my elbow hurt so much that I could barely speak. I swallowed a big gulp of air. I tried not to cry in front of the soldier.
“He slipped and fell on his arm,” Sa said. “I think he broke it.”
Mother got down on her knees and squeezed my elbow. “Does that hurt?”
“It hurts,” I said, almost in a whisper.
She tried to straighten my elbow. I screamed. The dark-haired soldier knelt beside me. He pressed his fingers into my tender elbow. I winced and screamed again. Then he probed my bony arm, touching gently. When he finished, he looked up at my mother and shook his head.
“Your arm isn’t broken,” she said. “You jammed it.”
The soldier said something to my mother and then walked quickly out to the alley. When he came back, he held some blue cloth in his hands.
“He’s going to put your elbow in a sling,” my mother said. She saw the fear in my eyes.
The soldier lifted my injured arm, wrapped the blue cloth under my elbow, and tied the sling around my neck. He smiled, and his brown eyes were bright in the afternoon sun. He said a few things to Mother, disappeared into the bungalow, and came back out. I knew he was about to leave, but when he turned to say good-bye, he brought his arms from behind his back and gave me a tea box sealed with green tape.
“There’s a gift for you inside,” Mother said. “But you can’t open the tea box until your elbow heals.”
I waited for a week. My elbow still hurt a little, but my mother said I could open the box. I took a knife, cut the tape, and pulled out something with green bands and moving dials.
“A watch!” I said.
“Now you can tell time,” my mother said as she stitched a patch over a hole on my brother’s shorts.
“How can I do that?” I asked.
“I’ll show you,” she said. “See the little hands?”
“What hands?”
She pointed to the face of the watch. “These little things. They’re called hands.”
“They don’t look like hands,” I said. “They look like needles.”
“Okay, then. The little needle shows the hours. The big needle shows the minutes.”
“What are hours and minutes?” I asked.
“Ways to tell the time,” she said. “Days are made of hours and hours are made of minutes.”
“How many hours in a minute?” I asked.
“Minutes are smaller,” she said, laughing. “Hours are made of minutes.”
“Then why is the big needle the minutes? Shouldn’t the big needle be the hours?”
“Because minutes happen faster,” she said, exasperated, and continued her stitching.
I didn’t understand the concept of time. I only knew the passing of days and nights between Mother’s leaving and her eventual return. I knew the moments between the arrival and departure of my mother’s clients, when they entered and left our alley.
We never knew where Mother’s clients came from. Sa and I knew only that the land, the air, and the sea brought them. We watched them as they lumbered under the weight of their war gear and marched down the loading ramps of cargo planes and rode into town on trucks and Jeeps.
We cheered them as they disembarked from the decks of warships and landed on our coast with their rifles and steel pots and field caps shielding their eyes. We watched them as they jumped from the bellies of helicopters hovering over the landing zones and flattening the marsh grass into a carpet. We spied on them while crouched behind the grassy berms bordering the landing zones. We watched them loading crates of weapons and boxes of ammo and medical supplies into the backs of deuce-and-a-halves.
On many afternoons, we stood outside the gates of the prison or the army base on the other side of town and studied the soldiers, their uniforms and equipment. In a game that we played, we categorized them into the foot soldiers and the sailors, the men who drove tanks, the pilots who flew jets and helicopters. Then there were the soldiers our fathers must have known: the ones who patrolled the jungles and never came back. We spotted the soldiers who worked as cooks in the mess halls, and the soldiers who guarded the prisons, and the ones who worked in the Quonset huts and never were killed.
I knew time as the moments Sa and I roamed the streets and harbors and watched the men of war—the men who sometimes strolled down our alley. Time was when we peeked through the cracks in the bamboo partition at Mother and her clients. Time was the number of water drops plunking into the cistern. That was all I knew of seconds, minutes, and hours. Though I didn’t know how to read the moving hands, I knew that it was a gift, that the watch was mine.
AHJUHMA
from NATIVESPEAKER
Chang-rae Lee
I thought it would be the two of us, like that, forever.
But one day my father called from one of his vegetable stores in the Bronx and said he was going to JFK and would be late coming home. I didn’t think much of it. He often went to the airport, to the international terminal, to pick up a friend or a parcel from Korea. After my mother’s death he had a steady flow of old friends visiting us, hardly any relatives, and it was my responsibility to make up the bed in the guest room and prepare a tray of sliced fruit and corn tea or liquor for their arrival.
My mo
ther had always done this for guests; although I was a boy, I was the only child and there was no one else to peel the oranges and apples and set out nuts and spicy crackers and glasses of beer or a bottle of Johnnie Walker for my father and his friends. They used to sit on the carpeted floor around the lacquered Korean table with their legs crossed and laugh deeply and utterly together as if they had been holding themselves in for a long time, and I’d greedily pick at the snacks from the perch of my father’s sturdy lap, pinching my throat in just such a way that I might rumble and shake, too. My mother would smile and talk to them, but she sat on a chair just outside the circle of men and politely covered her mouth whenever one of them made her laugh or offered compliments on her still-fresh beauty and youth.
Born in Seoul, Korea, in 1965, CHANG-RAE LEE is the author of two novels, A Gesture Life and Native Speaker. He has won the Hemingway Foundation /PEN Award, among other honors, for Native Speaker, and was selected as one of the twenty best American writers under forty by The New Yorker. He lives in New Jersey with his family and teaches at Princeton University.
The night my father phoned I went to the cabinet where he kept the whiskey and nuts and took out a bottle for their arrival. An ashtray, of course, because the men always smoked. The men—it was always only men—were mostly friends of his from college now come to the States on matters of business. Import-export. They seemed exotic to me then. They wore shiny, textured gray-blue suits and wide ties and sported long sideburns and slightly too large brown-tinted polarizing glasses. It was 1971. They dragged into the house huge square plastic suitcases on wheels, stuffed full of samples of their wares, knock-off perfumes and colognes, gaudy women’s handkerchiefs, plastic AM radios cast in the shapes of footballs and automobiles, leatherette handbags, purses, belts, tinny watches and cuff links, half-crushed boxes of Oriental rice crackers and leathery sheets of dried squid, and bags upon bags of sickly-sweet sucking candy whose transparent wrappers were edible and dissolved on the tongue.
In the foyer these men had to struggle to pull off the tight black shoes from their swollen feet, and the sour, ammoniac smell of sweat sopped wool and cheap leather reached me where I stood overlooking them from the raised living room of our split-level house, that nose-stinging smell of sixteen hours of sleepless cramped flight from Seoul to Anchorage to New York shot so full of their ranks, hopeful of good commerce here in America.
My father opened the door at ten o’clock, hauling into the house two huge, battered suitcases. I had just set out a tray of fruits and rice cakes to go along with the liquor on the low table in the living room and went down to help him. He waved me off and nodded toward the driveway.
“Go help,” he said, immediately bearing the suitcases upstairs.
I walked outside. A dim figure of a woman stood unmoving in the darkness next to my father’s Chevrolet. It was late winter, still cold and miserable, and she was bundled up in a long woolen coat that nearly reached the ground. Beside her were two small bags and a cardboard box messily bound with twine. When I got closer to her she lifted both bags and so I picked up the box; it was very heavy, full of glass jars and tins of pickled vegetables and meats. I realized she had transported homemade food thousands of miles, all the way from Korea, and the stench of overripe kimchee shot up through the cardboard flaps and I nearly dropped the whole thing.
The woman mumbled something in an unusual accent about my not knowing what kimchee was, but I didn’t answer. I thought she was a very distant relative. She didn’t look at all like us, nothing like my mother, whose broad, serene face was the smoothest mask. This woman, I could see, had deep pockmarks stippling her high, fleshy cheeks, like the scarring from a mistreated bout of chickenpox or small-pox, and she stood much shorter than I first thought, barely five feet in her heeled shoes. Her ankles and wrists were as thick as posts. She waited for me to turn and start for the house before she followed several steps behind me. I was surprised that my father wasn’t waiting in the doorway, to greet her or hold the door, and as I walked up the carpeted steps leading to the kitchen I saw that the food and drink I had prepared had been cleared away.
“Please come this way,” he said to her stiffly in Korean, appearing from the hallway to the bedrooms. “Please come this way.”
He ushered her into the guest room and shut the door behind them. After a few minutes he came back out and sat down in the kitchen with me. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes, and his shirt and the knees and cuffs of his pants were stained with the slick juice of spoiled vegetables. I was eating apple quarters off the tray. My father picked one, bit into it, and then put it back. This was a habit of his, perhaps because he worked with fruits and vegetables all day, randomly sampling them for freshness and flavor.
He started speaking, but in English. Sometimes, when he wanted to hide or not outright lie, he chose to speak in English. He used to break into it when he argued with my mother, and it drove her crazy when he did and she would just plead, “No, no!” as though he had suddenly introduced a switchblade into a clean fistfight. Once, when he was having some money problems with a store, he started berating her with some awful stream of nonsensical street talk, shouting “my hot mama shit ass tight cock sucka,” and “slant-eye spic-and-span motha-fucka” (he had picked it up, no doubt, from his customers). I broke into their argument and started yelling at him, making sure I was speaking in complete sentences about his cowardice and unfairness, shooting back at him his own medicine, until he slammed both palms on the table and demanded, “You shut up! You shut up!”
I kept at him anyway, using the biggest words I knew, whether they made sense or not, school words like “socioeconomic” and “intangible,” anything I could lift from my dizzy burning thoughts and hurl against him, until my mother, who’d been perfectly quiet the whole time, whacked me hard across the back of the head and shouted in Korean, Who do you think you are?
Fair fight or not, she wasn’t going to let me dress down my father, not with language, not with anything.
“Hen-ry,” he now said, accenting as always the second syllable, “you know, it’s difficult now. Your mommy dead and nobody at home. You too young for that. This nice lady, she come for you. Take care home, food. Nice dinner. Clean house. Better that way.”
I didn’t answer him.
“I better tell you before, I know, but I know you don’t like. So what I do? I go to store in morning and come home late, nine o’clock, ten. No good, no good. Nice lady, she fix that. And soon we move to nice neighborhood, over near Fern Pond, big house and yard. Very nice place.”
“Fern Pond? I don’t want to move! And I don’t want to move there, all the rich kids live there.”
“Ha!” he laughed. “You rich kid now, your daddy rich rich man. Big house, big tree, now even we got houselady. Nice big yard for you. I pay all cash.”
“What? You bought a house already?”
“Price very low for big house. Fix-her-upper. You thank me someday . . .”
“I won’t. I won’t move. No way.”
Byong-ho, he said firmly. His voice was already changing. He was shifting into Korean, getting his throat ready. Then he spoke as he rose to leave. Let’s not hear one more thing about it. The woman will come with us to the new house and take care of you. This is what I have decided. Our talk is past usefulness. There will be no other way.
In the new house, the woman lived in the two small rooms behind the kitchen pantry. I decided early on that I would never venture in there or try to befriend her. Her manner unnerved me. She never laughed. She spoke only when it mattered, when a thing needed to be done, or requested, or acknowledged. Otherwise the sole sounds I heard from her were the sucking noises she would make through the spaces between her teeth after meals and in the mornings. Once I heard her humming a pretty melody in her room, some Korean folk song, but as I walked toward her doorway to hear it better she stopped immediately, and I never heard it again.
She kept a clean and orderly house. Because she
was the one who really moved us from the old house, she organized and ran the new one in a manner that suited her. In the old Korean tradition, my presence in the kitchen was unwelcome unless I was actually eating, or passing through the room. I understood that her two rooms, the tiny bathroom adjoining them, and the kitchen and pantry, constituted the sphere of her influence, and she was quick to deflect any interest on my part to look into the cabinets or closets. If she were present, I was to ask her for something I wanted, even if it was in the refrigerator, and then she would get it for me. She became annoyed if I lingered too long, and I quickly learned to remove myself immediately after any eating or drinking. Only when a friend of mine was over, after school or sports, would she mysteriously recede from the kitchen. My tall, talkative white friends made her nervous. Then she would wait noiselessly in her back room until we had gone.
She smelled strongly of fried fish and sesame oil and garlic. Though I didn’t like it, my friends called her “Aunt Scallion,” and made faces behind her back.
Sometimes I thought she was some kind of zombie. When she wasn’t cleaning or cooking or folding clothes she was barely present; she never whistled or hummed or made any noise, and it seemed to me as if she only partly possessed her own body, and preferred it that way. When she sat in the living room or outside on the patio she never read or listened to music. She didn’t have a hobby, as far as I could see. She never exercised. She sometimes watched the soap operas on television (I found this out when I stayed home sick from school), but she always turned them off after a few minutes.
She never called her family in Korea, and they never called her. I imagined that something deeply horrible had happened to her when she was young, some nameless pain, something brutal, that a malicious man had taught her fear and sadness and she had had to leave her life and family because of it.
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