The Queen of Tears
chris mckinney
Copyright © 2001 by Chris McKinney
First published in Hawaii in 2001 by Mutual Publishing
All rights reserved.
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKinney, Chris.
The queen of tears / Chris McKinney.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56947-420-6
1. Korean Americans—Fiction. 2. Family—Hawaii—Fiction. 3. Hawaii—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.C5623Q44 2006
813’.6—dc22
2005055461
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In Bruegel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
– W.H. Auden
Table of Contents
chapter one • FEAR OF LANDING BADLY
chapter two • DEATH OF KWANG JA
chapter three • THE INSTITUTION
chapter four • THE QUEEN OF TEARS
chapter five • THE TANK
chapter six • HIGH CLASS REFUGEE
chapter seven • TURBULENCE
chapter eight • SILVER KNIFE
chapter nine • LEARNING TO FLY
FEAR OF LANDING BADLY
chapter one
-1-
THE plane made that momentary drop—the one where the passengers know they’ll survive, but some doubt they will anyway. Why can’t turbulence be seen? Soong Nan Lee asked herself as she squeezed the armrest and looked out of the twenty-year-old plexiglass. Sunlight penetrated it, accentuating the arbitrary scratches on the glowing surface. Soong squinted. Something so big should be tangible. Hot air from the surface grating against the cold, mile-high air should at least create a mixture of red and blue, a deep purple that illuminates the vast emptiness— north, south, east, west. But there was no purple; there was only nothingness shaking her, just to remind her that it was there.
She could not help but look out; she never could. The nausea began to roll in her stomach and scratch at her throat as the Continental 747 sailed way above the clouds. She always got motion sickness, but she’d never needed the sickness bag tucked away in the back of the seat in front of her. She looked out again, willing the nausea away. It appeared as if the plane were not moving forward. The only logical direction was down. The seatbelt strapped firmly across her lap seemed ridiculous to her. The plane made another sudden drop, and Soong closed her eyes. The sudden descent lasted only a second. If you get me through this, God, Buddha, Allah, Shiva, Amaterasu, Ra, or Whomever, I promise I won’t fight with the children, she thought. She opened her eyes. The Caucasian businessman sitting next to her put his large hand on her shoulder. “You alright, missy?”
Soong glanced at his hand, and he put it back in his lap. There was a wedding band on his finger, one about as old as the airplane window. Twenty years had a way of aging the most important objects the same way—durability remained, but beauty seemed gone. Soong knew it took more than two decades of aging to restore the facade of beauty, whether talking about jewelry, cars, or marriages. It took much longer than two decades for something to become a quaint antique.
Sandy strands of hair grew above and below the gold ring. His hand moved up to scratch the top of his big stomach. He scratched in between the thin, blue vertical lines of his dress shirt. The hand moved further up to adjust the red tie that hung loosely around the man’s thick neck. As he tightened the tie, a fold of white skin and flesh resisted the pressure and spilt over his starched collar. Soong looked at the man’s fiftyish face. He may have been handsome once. Maybe he drove an American hot rod as a teenager and dated plump, white cheerleaders. Maybe he picked them off a tree, like pears. But now layers of fat hung loosely off his body. As it was with many who aged, the flesh was shrinking, but the skin was not shrinking with it. He was like a water skin; life was drinking from him, and what was drunk was permanently gone.
After tightening his tie, both of his arms dropped down to both armrests. It would have bothered her that he took the liberty to take the armrest next to her, if she wasn’t one of the only adults on the plane who thought of her economy seat as roomy, and even more so, if she didn’t feel a twinge of pity for him at that moment. It would be a while until he was an antique, like her. He smiled. “Just a little turbulence, ma’am. Nothin’ to fuss over.”
He’d almost cried during the in-flight movie. She heard the determined clearing of the throat and the sniffling during the end of the film. It was a piece of typical melodrama, and Soong did not have to keep up with the dialogue to know it. She just watched the faces of the actors twist grotesquely at the end. It had been the same in her country. Didn’t moviemakers know that life is full of erosions, not explosions? She’d watched her second husband erode bravely. It may have been braver than anything he did in World War II or Korea. It’s far easier to muster courage to leap into darkness than it is for one to walk slowly into a sloping pool of graduating dusk every day for nine months while the doctors disassemble you, never replacing any parts. Cut this out, tie this together. Let’s make this into this. Intestines were like a second-rate clown’s balloon animals to doctors. Soong politely smiled back at the white man sitting next to her, then turned her head toward the window. “So what’s takin’ you to paradise, ma’am?” he asked.
Paradise? He must have meant Hawaii. Soong turned to the man and said, “Famry.”
“Why, you from the Orient, ma’am? It’s funny I just assumed you was American. You know, you Orientals, you guys made it all over the U.S. Hell, back in Dallas, Texas, we got you folks runnin’ for city council and stuff. I think it’s great.” He winked. “You know we was all immigrants once.”
Soong smiled politely. She only understood about two-thirds of what the man had said. He extended his big, hairy hand. “Well ma’am, I’m Bobby McVie of Texas. I’m going to Hawaii on business. Hawaii may be the great fiber-optics hub of the Pacific Rim, you know. Where you from? China? Japan?”
Soong shook his hand. Yes, to Americans, it was always only either China or Japan. “Korea, but I live Long Island.”
“I’ll be. Long Island, New York? See I told you. You guys are coast to coast. Hell, I’ve been to Hawaii twice. Lots of Asians. You’ll like it.”
Soong nodded. She’d lived in Hawaii years ago for eleven years. Her second husband, the beautiful one that the doctors made a stomach out of intestines for, had been born and raised in Hawaii. She didn’t love it. “So who you visiting in paradise?” the man asked.
She was going for her only son’s wedding, but instead she said, “My grandson.”
Bobby laughed loudly. The sudden boom made Soong jump. “Grandson? Hell, you’re too young to have grandkids. What are ya? Forty-five?”
Soong smiled. She was almost sixty. Suddenly the plane made another quick, rapid descent. Soong grabbed the armrest again and closed her eyes. She swore her body separated from the seat for just a moment. Her throat convulsed. “Grandson. You gotta be kiddin’ me. Look at you. Five-one, maybe five-two. Hell, you can’t be no more than a hundred pounds. Ghost white, too. No one in Texas would believe a child could come out of that bird-body of yours.”
Soong kept her eyes closed. Nope, she wasn’t more than a hundred pounds. Maybe Newton was wrong, and she’d be the last to hit the ocean when the plane went down. Soong looked at the big white man. Yes, she knew who Newton was.
* * *
When Soong stepped out of the plane at Honolulu International Airport, the suffocation of humidity filled her lungs. She didn’t like the open air. After only a minute, she was glistening and wondered whether the light layer of powder on her face would cake, then crack. Before walking further, she pulled her compact out of her purse and checked her make-up. She immediately missed the coolness and the dryness in the air of an early Long Island spring.
A crowd of faces waited at the gate. She remembered these people. There were more than a dozen tanned faces, some Asian, some Caucasian, some Hawaiian, and some of mixed race. The melting pot of races watched the gate exit and waited for their loved ones to appear. Most of them wore either shorts or jeans. Some wore T-shirts, while others wore tank tops. Soong smoothed out her gray Versace skirt and lightly touched the perfect quarter-karat diamond earring on her right lobe.
From this group of smiling faces emerged a broad, Korean face. It was a thirty-five-year-old face, with squinted eyes covered by a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses. The face also had a broad, flat nose. The man was wearing a gold hoop earring in his left lobe. The face wasn’t smiling. His mustache was thick, except in the middle where hair grew sparsely. The man, who was wearing a yellow Polo shirt neatly tucked into black jeans, was leaning on the last seat of the last row of black chairs in front of the gate. Though his face and nose were broad, the rest of him seemed rather flimsy, and it seemed that was the reason why he leaned on things constantly, because it took all of the body’s frail might to hold up that broad face. She walked toward the unsmiling face and greeted it with the same non-smile.
“Hi Mother,” Donny said in Korean, already avoiding eye contact.
“Hello Chung Yun,” she said, using the name she’d given him. She and her three children always spoke to each other in Korean.
“How was the flight?” Donny asked, as he sighed and pushed himself off the chair, acting as if he were lifting a hundred pounds over his head.
“Ten hours of excruciating horror.”
“They almost never crash, Mother.”
“But they do crash, Son. And mine seemed as good or as bad as any.”
They exited the gate, passing flower lei and concession stands on their way to the enclosed, air-conditioned baggage claim. Tourists, both Caucasian and Japanese, with brightly colored shirts that she imagined were bought at various overpriced tourist traps, walked to and from the gates talking to each other loudly. Others, locals, who wore both darker clothing and skin, also walked the airport grounds. A female voice that sounded like it was struggling to find a tone of politeness was on the intercom announcing departures. The still, humid air painted a thin layer of oil on these white, Asian, and local faces even in air conditioning. Soong wanted to find a bathroom to check her foundation thoroughly, but decided to wait until she got to the car. Then, she instinctively stopped walking and looked back. Donny was loafing about fifteen feet behind her. The children had always complained that she walked too fast, but to her the problem was that they didn’t walk fast enough. As soon as Donny reached her, she began to walk quickly again.
After they descended down the escalator and reached the baggage claim carousel, Donny asked, “How many bags do you have?”
Just as Soong was about to answer, a voice boomed far behind her. “Hey beautiful, now don’t tell me that’s your grandson.”
Soong turned around and waved emphatically, like a little girl. She caught herself, and immediately stopped. “He my son,” she said, struggling to find her best English.
Bobby, the man from the plane, laughed. Soong waved once, like a matriarch this time, and walked to the other side of the stainless steel carousel. “Made a new friend?” Donny asked, not looking at his mother.
“He was sitting by me in the plane.”
“Oh.”
“I have four bags.”
“O.K.”
They grabbed the luggage and walked through the sliding glass doors. Again, the heavy hand of humidity hit Soong, but it was not as bad as it had been the moment she’d walked off the plane. She was acclimating, she hoped. They waited at the curb for the light to change. A huge cement overpass crossed above them. For a moment, Soong imagined it crumbling and falling on them. But then her concentration shifted to the amount of time she was wasting waiting for a light that was way too slow for her tastes to change. As soon as the lighted red hand switched to the white figure in mid-stride, Soong took two steps before the next person even put a foot off the sidewalk. Donny, along with another half-dozen people, crossed the street and entered the multilevel parking garage two steps behind her. The ones who, like Donny, were carrying multiple pieces of luggage, kept a good pace. Suddenly, she remembered that she had no idea where her son parked the car, so she again waited. After he finally caught up, she steadied herself for the effort she knew it would take to walk slowly behind him to the car.
Donny led Soong to a white BMW 328i and smiled. He put the bags down and pulled his key chain from his pocket. Attached to one of the rings was a small, plastic contraption with a series of buttons on it. Donny pressed one, and the trunk popped open. Soong could tell that he was making a concerted effort not to look at her. He was acting as if he were accepting a Nobel Prize with the utmost humility. She shook her head. “How can you afford a car like this?”
Donny struggled, putting the three bags of Louis Vuitton luggage he’d been carrying into the trunk. Then he pressed another button, and she heard the door locks make a dull pop. He opened the door for her. “Don’t start, Mother.”
She put the last Louis Vuitton bag in the back seat, then waited for Donny to sit on the beige leather. “You’re absolutely crazy. You’re not even working. When did you buy this car?”
He turned the key. “Actually, I didn’t buy it. Crystal leased it.”
She knew that she was pulling apart the pride he felt about driving a fifty-thousand-dollar automobile that he was trying not to reveal moments before. But she could not help herself. To leave it alone would have been like not pulling a loose thread off of a piece of clothing. And who can resist that?
They drove through the busy underpass of the airport, following a long line of cars, taxis, and Greyhound-sized tour buses. Exhaust billowed from the back of the bus, choking Soong. She rolled up her window and pulled down the vanity mirror. She checked her foundation, her pink lipstick and the light blush on her cheeks. “So Mom,” Donny said, “are you finally going to move here for good?”
She pushed the mirror back in its place. “It depends.”
“Mom, Dad died a year ago. You already sold the liquor store. It’s time you moved close to family. We’re all here.”
Exactly, Soong thought. Family. Family gave her a funny feeling in her stomach. It was kind of like being in that plane, feeling it drop, and seeing no escape through a glowing, scratched-up window. She didn’t want to look, but she could never stop herself from squinting from the light and looking out. She was searching for beauty in her family, like she was searching for purple in turbulence. She’d found signs of the color in both of her daughters at one time or another, but she only saw the richness of blue and red mixed together in just one currently living member of her family, and it wasn’t her son. “I don’t know,” she said.
The car slowed in the afternoon traffic. The BMW rolled slowly behind a rusting Toyota truck with absurdly big tires. “How is my grandson?”
“I was wondering when you’d finally get to that.”
“What? He’s my only grandchild.”
“Well, I don’t know why you’re asking me. He’s not my son.”
It seemed Donny was always self-conscious about the fact that he never had any children, while his older sister produced the loveliest child in
the world. Soong looked at her son, still waiting for an answer. His eyes remained focused on the windshield.
Donny sighed. “The last time I saw him, he looked fine. Turning into a real local boy, though. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him driving a truck like the one in front of us in a few years.”
Soong shook her head. It was the truck of an uneducated, blue-collar man who blew all of his money on yellow, accordion-looking things to put under his truck, and big tires. Soong had heard of Freud. A penis substitute. Her grandson would never come to that, and she knew that Donny was just trying to scare her in what she considered feeble retaliation. “And how is your sister doing?”
“She’s good.”
Soong nodded. They entered the H-1 Freeway, which led to Waikiki. Donny lit a Winston cigarette and rolled down the window. He had an effeminate way of smoking a cigarette that bothered her. “You should quit,” she said.
The car whizzed by the industrial buildings surrounding the airport. “Don’t start, Mom. And besides, why do you demand to stay in a hotel? You should save money and stay with me.”
“I can’t stand your smoking and drinking. Just drop me off at the hotel. If I stay any longer, I will stay with your sister.”
“When is Darian coming in?”
Soong thought about her youngest child with a mixture of fear, lack of comprehension, and pride. Darian was her American child. Why she, like her older daughter, gave her child a name she could not pronounce correctly, she would never understand. Darian was flying in from U.C. Berkeley the following week. “Next Tuesday.”
“She can stay with me and save money.”
“She’ll stay in the hotel like me.”
“Figures,” Donny said in English.
Soong sighed. Donny seemed always wanting to take any action by her as a slight against him. And some of this, she knew, was warranted. They didn’t talk for the next fifteen minutes. Soong peppered the time with light coughs until Donny finally threw his cigarette out. Right before they got off of the freeway, she saw a tiny thread hanging from the sleeve of her blouse, and refused, with all of her will power, to pull it.
The Queen of Tears Page 1