9.
I had never been to Los Angeles before, and I wondered why Hannah had chosen to move there. I couldn’t remember her ever mentioning it in the lists she’d occasionally draw up of potential places to live. I arrived in Los Angeles determined to be as businesslike as possible with Hannah. But when she answered the phone for the first time since she left, she sounded so cautious that I was overwhelmed by a sudden surge of protectiveness, as if she was still a kid.
“It’s me,” I said. “Janie.”
There was a brief silence. “What do you want?” she asked.
I looked around my hotel room, at the dingy cover of my bed, and the slightly damp carpet. The goodwill I had felt upon hearing Hannah’s voice dissolved. What did she think I wanted from her? What did she think I would do? “I’m in L.A.,” I said. “I came to see you.”
Another pause: an intake of breath. “Are Mom and Dad with you?”
“No.”
“All right,” Hannah said, and her voice was firm and level. “I can see you, then.”
That evening I waited at the beach across from my hotel, where Hannah had agreed to meet after dinner. Neither of us had suggested eating together. As it was, I had no appetite. So I went to the beach early, to stretch my legs and walk off my tension while I waited.
Clumps of seaweed and dead fish washed onto the shore and drifted out again. The water looked dirty, but I took my shoes off and stood in the damp, cool sand. Across the ocean, I thought, my parents were hovering somewhere in the distance, moving toward another continent. Beyond them, the sun was sinking into the horizon. “Five minutes,” I said out loud, playing my father’s game. I looked at my watch.
In the darkening light, I looked over the crowd of people beginning to gather up their things to leave. I saw Hannah coming from the landmark we had chosen as our meeting place, the foot of the stairs that led to Washington Avenue. The shock of seeing her was sudden after all. I pinched my arms. There she was, in front of me. She was dressed all in white linen, and her pants billowed out slightly in the breeze.
“Hey,” she said.
All through her childhood, she had wanted to look like me: to wear the clothes I wore, to be my height, to sleep in my bed. I’d still thought of her as a little kid when I left for college, the shadow listening in on my phone conversations, trying to read my books, always wanting to know what I was doing that was more interesting. “Did Unni have to do it, too?” was her most common refrain. “Did Unni do it when she was little?”
She snooped through everything: she read my diary, put her feet in my shoes, she even spilled the small plastic bottle of perfume I’d made my mother buy me at the grocery store. She wanted to follow me everywhere. Sometimes when I said something, she mimicked me. My parents thought it was funny, but I wanted to hit her.
I caught her in my room once, sitting in my chair at my desk, in a dress my grandmother had sent me by ship from Korea. It was a dress I hadn’t even gotten to wear yet. She had found my diary, which I kept hidden in my desk inside an old notebook. She had also found the key to my diary, which I kept hidden inside a lone sock in the back of my sock drawer.
She was sitting in my chair, bent over my diary with her crayons in hand. She had opened the diary to the page where I listed the names of all the boys I had ever had crushes on: a boy from my old neighborhood, a boy from school, the first boy to give me a flower, the first boy I had ever wanted to give me a kiss, and, since moving to Michigan, Jesus.
When I crossed the room and pulled the diary out of her hands, I saw that she had written her own name in crooked capital letters at the bottom of this list, and drawn hearts over the names of the boys. Furiously, I pulled the chair she was in to the middle of the room. I started chanting at her, partly in English, partly in Korean, partly in a wild sort of rhythmic gibberish. I danced around her, blocking her every time she tried to get up. It was a sort of wild imitation of a mudang, a shaman woman I’d seen in Korea once, who’d danced at a distant uncle’s funeral.
When I finished, Hannah was shaking in her chair, crying.
“I curse you,” I said, panting and exhilarated. I pointed my finger at her face, and she cowered, raising her hands to shield herself. “I call on the ghosts and skeletons and creepy things to find you and take you away.” I laughed. When I snatched at her wrist to drag her out of my room, she screamed.
Once I was gone at college, she stopped wanting to be like me, and turned into someone else entirely. She stopped wanting what I had, and started acquiring the things I would never have. She grew taller, surpassed me, and people began to notice her.
My mother once said to me, “It is easier for some people to be loved than others.” I don’t remember the context, and am sure she did not mean to compare Hannah to me. But it applied: Hannah was easier to love. Even when we first started school in America, she made friends easily. I never really understood how she did it.
When she was still in high school I would come home and see how everyone looked at her, how strangers, even adult men, would pause in the street to look at her, and how easily she held their attention. I had always hated when people looked at me: it made me uncomfortable. Their interest made me feel suddenly awkward, as if I was under an intense light, onstage, jerkily moving around.
No one could call Hannah awkward, though. My parents’ friends were always asking if she was a dancer or a gymnast. Now, against her loose linen clothes, her body was tan and glowing, and I was aware of the bags under my eyes, of being older, of having aged in the last few months.
“You look great,” I said. “Good for you.”
She smiled at me, as if that had been a peace offering on my part and she was deciding whether or not to accept.
I said, “Let’s walk.”
We walked up the beach, not looking at each other. She said, “How’s your dissertation going?”
I shrugged. “Who cares,” I said. “I’ve had other things to worry about.” I was keenly aware that I was here at my parents’ bidding. Meanwhile she had made a life for herself here. How had she done that?
She started to say something, stopped, started again. But before she could continue, a strange barking howl sounded directly ahead of us, drowning out her voice and startling us both. We looked toward the noise, and saw that a small crowd had gathered around a ditch. Surrounded by a semicircle of people, a seal was trapped there. It bellowed and flopped.
“Hang on,” Hannah said. “Let me check this out.” She walked to the ditch. “Has anyone sent for help?” she asked the crowd. They shook their heads, and began talking to her all at once.
“I think it’s hurt,” someone said. “I don’t know how long it’s been there,” said another. Hannah waved them all quiet and pulled out her phone. She called Animal Control, gave our location, said a few more words, clicked her phone shut, and came back to me.
People kept coming up to us and trying to talk to her, but she said, “Help is coming,” and nothing more. We stood, a little apart, watching the seal writhe. Its skin shone against the dull sand.
“A lot of seals have been beached out here lately,” Hannah said, turning to me. “One even attacked a few fishing boats and a swimmer last week.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Why?”
“They have brain damage from the pollution,” Hannah said. She shrugged. “It makes the males more aggressive, and it makes the females miscarry. They have seizures all day long. That’s probably what happened to this one.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. In the ditch, the seal sobbed. The crowd around us was growing. A woman pulled out her camera and started snapping photographs. The seal flapped closer to the shore, then reversed and began to flap back toward the ditch.
Animal Control came and trained a spotlight on the seal. The water, when it sprayed out of the hose, smelled filthy. The seal howled. She gasped in the frothy green water, the fierce blast propelling her forward. They will kill her, I thought. I turned to Hannah, but she had already taken several steps aw
ay, ready to move on. “Animal Control can handle it now,” Hannah said, and started walking away before I could respond.
When we were younger, my mother had told us stories about the seal-people who could turn into humans when they came to shore. If they lost their seal skin they’d be stranded on land forever. My mother had told us a story about a seal-woman who had lost her skin one night and found herself stranded: unknowing, she married the man who had hidden her skin, and had human children with him. When one day she found her skin in the attic, she slipped into it and swam away, leaving behind her husband and children.
My mother had also told a similar story about a heavenly maiden whose clothes had been stolen when she came to earth to bathe. When at long last she discovered her clothes, she put them on and gathered up her children. Her husband, who had stolen and hidden her heavenly clothes, begged and wept, clutching at the hem of her dress as she rose to heaven.
Growing up, Hannah and I had played at being seal-women. We’d played at heavenly maidens. We’d played at abandoning each other, over and over again.
I followed my sister up the long steps to the street above the beach. “Are you seeing anyone?” I asked at the top of the stairs.
She shook her head. “Nope.”
I was vaguely disappointed. I’d almost hoped that she was involved with a man. It seemed like something that could account for her cruelty. I said, “So Dad’s sick.”
She blinked. “What do you mean, sick?”
“Yeah. He has cancer. They sold the house.”
She stopped walking, but otherwise she took it calmly. “Wow,” she said. “What are his chances?” She looked at me intently, and for a moment I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to describe how after his prognosis, my father had held out his fingers, spread out his hands before him and studied them, counting out the months. “I feel perfectly fine,” he’d said then, laughing. And my mother and I had laughed with him, as if we all believed this new information was a joke that could be laughed away.
“I think that’s something you’re going to have to ask him yourself,” I said.
She touched my arm. “Come on, Unni,” she said. “Let’s be friends.” She smiled at me. As if all the trouble between us had been nothing at all. I thought of my mother weeping as she walked from room to room in our house. I thought of the voice mail I’d left Hannah after she’d abandoned us, and of the hours I’d spent waiting, afterward, worrying.
“What’s going to happen to that seal?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Do you remember your friend’s baby that fell out of the window?” I asked. “I went to the trial for the boys who did that.”
“Oh yeah? What happened?” She sounded totally casual, and this made me angry. I’d been so sure that story had been connected to her leaving.
“The boys went to a juvenile prison,” I said. “All three of them.” I suddenly wondered if they had been separated in prison, or if they saw each other every day. I wondered how that made them feel. My chest hurt. “Did you care about that baby?” I asked. “Did you care about those boys?”
“Unni,” Hannah said, the word for older sister: I could feel it pulling on me like a tide. She said, “I’ve stopped wasting time on things I can’t save.”
I wished I could tell her how anxious my parents had been, how much she’d been missed. I thought of my grandmother telling me to always keep my sister safe. I remembered our father bowing to his trees. “What do you know,” I said, “about who you can save?”
10.
In sixth grade, Japanese cars flooded the market, and the auto industry in Michigan went into crisis. That year the father of a girl in my class killed a Chinese man; he claimed he thought his victim was Japanese. With six witnesses to the murder, the judge let him off with manslaughter and a fine.
When all this happened, I was in Mrs. Yates’s class with my best friends, Allison and Heather. I had a crush on a boy named Curtis. He had told Erin Fuller to fuck off once during silent reading time, his voice slicing through the quiet of the room. I had looked up from my book just as Erin started to cry. Curtis was sent to the principal’s office, Mrs. Yates ordering him out without even pausing to glance at Erin. I admired the way he got up and left the room, like it didn’t bother him at all. Like he enjoyed it.
I didn’t tell Allison and Heather about my crush on Curtis. I didn’t tell them when he passed me a note in class one day that said, I like you, do you want to go with me? Check one. I didn’t check either the yes or the no box, but put the note in my backpack and took it home with me, where I put it in my desk drawer to look at whenever I wanted.
At Allison’s house we ate brownies and played with her Barbie collection. She had twenty-three of them, and each time I visited, it seemed, their collective wardrobe had increased. Some days we counted them. Heather had only three Barbies, in the outfits they’d originally come in.
Heather showed us porno magazines at her house, the ones her older brother kept hidden in his baseball card collection. Once, while Allison and I turned the pages, shrieking, Heather got on all fours and stuck out her chest. She raised her butt in the air and arched her back. She pouted. Her frizzy brown hair stuck out in wisps. “How do I look?” she asked. “Sexy?”
“Like a hooker,” Allison said.
At my place, we played house. Allison was the mother, Heather was the older sister, and I was the baby. Heather always wanted to spank me, but Allison pretended to feed me from Hannah’s old bottle, and stroked my head when I pretended to cry. We looked deep into each other’s eyes, and whenever we did this, I felt vaguely ashamed. Nobody in sixth grade was supposed to play house, so we swore not to tell anyone. To seal the promise, we spent two weeks making friendship bracelets using my mother’s special silk embroidery thread.
My mother used to embroider beautiful peacocks, roses, and cranes that she framed and gave to relatives. When I lived in Korea I had loved the pictures my mother made, and wanted to learn how. But after we moved to America her workbasket lay untouched until I brought it out. The basket itself had a peacock embroidered on the cover, and inside were nestled lovely spools of silk thread swirling around each other in bright whorls of color. The first time I’d shown Allison and Heather, Allison had said, “Wow,” and reached out her finger to touch the shining spools. I’d been proud then to have something special to offer.
In any case, the three of us were inseparable. During recess we played on the monkey bars and swings. “This is reserved,” we said to the fifth graders who tried to use them. Sometimes we organized games of the Blob, which was our favorite game. We played the Blob on a field or court, and everyone had to stay within bounds. One kid was It. Whoever he caught had to join hands with him, and the kid at the end of the chain was whipped around by the arm of the Blob as he tried to grab whoever was still free. If you played long enough and there were enough kids, the Blob always became so large that it could reach all the boundaries, and the last person was always eventually cornered and caught.
I was really good at staying out of reach, but I liked being part of the Blob, too. I liked succumbing to the wave of motion passing from one end of the chain to the next. It was a powerful feeling to watch the ends on either side swerve and close in on someone, to feel the tug that ran through everyone’s held hands. At those moments, I felt like the heart of something big.
One day Mrs. Yates asked us to hold on a minute before she let us out for recess. “You’ll probably find out that there’s been some trouble in Erin’s family,” she said. “Her father was involved in a fight, and a man died. The whole thing is a horrible shame.”
Then the bell rang, and we sat in our seats, not sure if she was finished. Mrs. Yates looked lost in that unaccustomed silence.
. . .
At recess, Heather told us what she knew about Mr. Fuller. “He killed some Chinese guy,” she said. She was perched on top of the monkey bars, her legs hanging over. “My father said the Chink had it
coming to him.”
I tried out a new flip on one of the single bars.
“Hey, Janie, no offense,” Heather said.
Allison, who had been sitting on her own side of the monkey bars, quietly chewing her hair, let the strands fall limp and wet to her shoulder. “Oh, Heather, shut up,” she said.
That same afternoon I had an appointment with an orthodontist to have braces put on. I didn’t want them, but my parents said it was for my own good.
My teeth were so sore after the braces were put on that I didn’t even want to stop at the supermarket, but my mother took me in anyway. When we walked past the card section, I thought of Erin. I couldn’t help thinking of my own father’s troubles when we left Korea, and I felt sorry for her, with her father in jail. I asked my mother if I could send her a card. I found a few that read, “Sharing Your Sorrow” and “In Your Time of Need,” but my mother said they weren’t appropriate.
At home I had to set the table for dinner, even though I could tell I wouldn’t be able to eat anything. It hurt too much. My lips scraped along the wires that connected the metal brackets, and when I clicked my teeth together by accident, pain shot through my gums.
That night Hannah tried to sneak into bed with me, but my head ached and I felt hot, and I kicked her out when she tried to crawl in, burying my face in my pillow when she tapped on my shoulder over and over, whispering my name. When I woke up shivering the next morning, she was curled at the foot of my bed, wrapped up in all my blankets.
I was one of only a few kids who had braces in the sixth grade, and when Erin came back to school she called me Robot. Nobody really talked to her for the first few days, but when she started telling the story of the fight between her father and the dead man, they gathered round to listen. In her version the Chinese man knew karate and screamed, “Ching chong ching chong,” when he attacked her father. The other kids laughed when Erin impersonated the dead man. In her story the dead man struck first: he hit her father while his back was turned. After that, some of the other kids in my class started calling me Robot, too.
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