The Queen of Tears

by Chris Mckinney

  Crystal walked to her closet. There he went again. The hardships of being raised by an actress mother. He didn’t even know hardship. But she knew it; she knew it well. It took focus for her to turn around and smile at Donny. She pulled off her dress and said, “Well maybe I should just go like this?”

  Donny laughed. “I’d love to see that,” he said without really looking.

  -4-

  So I had to go to dinner with the folks, my loser uncle, Grandma, and Crystal (I don’t know how she ended up with the loser). We were going to some sushi bar because Grandma likes rich people food. I think that’s all old people eat. Even the folks like rich people food sometimes, but they usually stay home. All Dad eats is broiled chicken or tuna, and Mom can’t live without her kimchee, or anything else that smells bad. I’d hate to have a friend over and have them see the inside of our icebox. There’s jars and jars of something pickled or fishy, always Korean and always hot, sitting next to at least a dozen bottles of Dad’s Mauna Loa Hawaiian Natural Spring Water. It’s like Mom should go live in Korea again. But I guess the folks are cool. Mom gives me money for Playstation and computer games, and Dad is thick. He paddles canoe for the Hawaiian Canoe Club, and he always wins. I hope I get muscles like him when I get older, but I doubt it. I’m not really into sports and surfing and stuff. I like my computer. I guess I’m kind of a nerd, and Dad gets on me sometimes about it. But he surfs the web with me sometimes. Mom would freak if she saw the porn stuff he has bookmarked. Good thing Mom doesn’t use the computer. She also doesn’t drive. It’s weird.

  So we get to the restaurant with Grandma to meet the loser and Crystal. It’s called, “Yoshi-something” or “Samurai-something,” you know some Japanese name. Well, we get there, and it’s so obvious that the loser is drunk. I think Crystal was drinking, too, because as soon as I walk in, she runs and kisses me. On the cheek. But it was awesome. You should’ve seen what she was wearing. She had this tiny white dress that was so tight, I don’t even know how she got her boobs into it. You could see her bra. Bras are cool. And she was wearing those huge Spice Girl shoes. Some girls in school wear those, but they look nothing like Crystal. They wish. It’s like Crystal should be on Baywatch or something.

  Well, after she kissed me, Grandma didn’t look too happy. You know, old school. I don’t know why she’s worried; like Crystal would go out with me, a kid. I wish. But she wasn’t happy about it, and what made things worse was that Crystal looked at her, smiled, and gave her a giant hug. I never saw anybody hug Grandma before, not even grandpa, when he was alive. Right after Crystal let her go, Grandma started smoothing out her rich, old-person skirt and twisted the big diamond on her right ear. I don’t think I ever saw Grandma wear anything wrinkled before. She’s like so old, and even her face doesn’t have wrinkles, just make-up. Well, after she stroked her skirt a few times and gave the earring a twirl, she walked up to me, pulled out a little plastic bag filled with white tissues from her purse, licked one of the tissues, and wiped my cheek. Some metallic lavender lipstick was smeared on the tissue. I can’t believe Grandma did that. What am I, two? I don’t want her spit on my face.

  Well, everybody said “hi” to each other, and we all took our usual places at the bar on the smallest chairs in the world. Of course, I had to sit between Grandma and Mom, which never made sense to me considering they always spent the whole night talking to each other in Korean. Dad sat next to Mom. Crystal sat in between loser and Dad. Dad and Crystal talked in pidgin, while the loser pigged out on like the most expensive and gross sushi, even that slimy orange stuff, while drinking sake like crazy. Dad liked to speak in pidgin to Crystal, even though he’s from Kahala, and she’s from Waianae. I went to Waianae a couple of times with Dad to surf, and there weren’t even sidewalks. I doubt anybody has computers over there. The Hawaiians there didn’t look like Dad either. They were like fat and poor and spoke in nothing but pidgin. Except for certain guys who looked mean, wore thick gold chains, and obviously lifted a lot of weights. I’m surprised Crystal came from there, too.

  So I was sitting at some sushi bar not knowing what to do with myself. It’s like I don’t have anything to say to these people, but everybody kept looking at me, except for the loser. Mom and Grandma would look at me every time they’d stop jabbering in Korean. Dad would look at me once in a while and roll his eyes. I guess he was bored too. He was down. And even Crystal looked at me a couple of times. But I’m such a fag because every time she’d look at me, I’d look away. I remember learning in speech class that eye contact is key, but it’s funny, in the ninth grade, you take speech and they try to teach you everything except how not to be nervous. I mean, isn’t that important? Well, everybody kept looking at me like I was supposed to start juggling or something, so I started to stare at the clock.

  Well, the clock was moving pretty slow. It was like I was in a time warp or something, so I started to watch the sushi chef. He was pretty cool. It was trippy seeing how fast he was. Slice the fish, roll the rice, spread wasabi on it, deliver. Five seconds, tops. He was really going at it, taking orders from the waitresses, taking orders from the loser. He was in the zone. It’s like when I play a computer game sometimes, like a real-time game. Everything is happening so fast, and then it’s like three hours later. I wanted to try. Every time I’d disappear, though, thinking about making sushi, Grandma would shove the picture of all of the sushis in front of me, trying to get me to eat something. “You pick,” she’d say over and over again. Ever since I was a kid, it’s like she gets off on making me eat. It used to be cool, but now it makes me lose my appetite. “You pick, you pick, you pick.” Jeez, I don’t know, maybe there was like no food in Korea in the old days. That’s probably why the loser is such a pig.

  So I’m sitting there trying to convince Grandma that I’m not hungry, and then suddenly everyone but me starts playing musical chairs because some old Japanese couple needed some seats. So instead of everyone moving over one, it’s like chaos. I guess being in a room full of chairs all day during the week does have its benefits. I was about to say something and complain, but suddenly I was sitting by Crystal, with Mom on my other side, and Grandma two seats away from me. Even from two seats away, she was tapping my arm and shoving the picture menu in front of my face. I was about to tell her that I wasn’t hungry when Mom leaned over me to talk to Crystal. “So Crystal, how’s work?”

  Immediately I start ordering sushis. Maguro, hamachi, ebi. Mom is so naïve. Like I don’t know what Crystal does.

  “Oh you know, the same. It’s getting slower and slower. Jeez, five, ten years ago, I was makin’ money. But now, people at McDonalds probably make more than me. Too bad I blew all that cash. I was too young to have that kind of money.”

  God, her perfume killed me as she leaned across me. Her right boob was like on my chest. Dad told me once that he’d take me to a strip bar when I turned eighteen, but that’s like years away.

  “So are you going to start something else?”

  Keep talkin’ Mom. I rudely raised my hand. “Two tako,” I said, probably too loudly.

  Crystal sighed. “Yeah, I’m trying. I think I’ll go back to school. You know, I got my G.E.D., so I was thinking about trying business college again. Maybe get a degree in legal aid or something. But in order for me to do that, someone has to get a job.”

  Go back to school? She’s crazy. No wonder why she’s with the jobless loser. She’s nuts. I was about to say something cool; I was about to tell Crystal in a really suave way that if she wanted to go to school, she could do my homework, but Grandma nudged me and pointed to all of the sushis I ordered, but didn’t eat. It was like she was Mr. Fantastic. She’s like three-two, and that’s when she just gets out of bed, and here she was, reaching me across Mom. Right when I was about to tell her to eat it, Mom gets up, Dad takes her seat, and Crystal turns around to talk to the loser. Dad was going to try to talk to Grandma. I hated when he did that. It was always so obvious that she didn’t understand him. “So Mom, t
ell me if you’re looking to stay here permanently. It’s a buyer’s market right now because of the bad economy. I could get a great deal on a nice one-bedroom condo, for about a thousand a month, five percent down.”

  Dad’s a real estate agent, whatever that is. It has something to do with houses and kissing people’s asses. He also day trades on the Internet. He’s up at four every morning. Anyway, sure enough, Grandma didn’t understand him too well. She just nodded, smiled, and said, “Thank you.” Lucky for her, she was interrupted when the old uncle turned pale, jumped out of his seat, and started walking really fast to the bathroom. What a loser. Even Dad laughed. “That son of yours has to learn to hold his food and liquor.”

  Grandma still smiled, but it was one of those smiles that look like walls. After a pause, Mom came back and told Grandma and Dad that she saw the loser rush past her, and that maybe it was time to go. She said it first to Grandma in Korean, or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what she said, because that’s what she told Dad right after. I turned to Crystal. She was gulping beer from a big bottle of Asahi. I was in awe.

  So two bad things came several minutes later, the loser and the check. It was funny though, one didn’t even touch or look at the other. Instead Mom, without even hesitating, grabbed the check. I caught a glimpse of it. Three hundred and fourteen. Old people are crazy. Well, Mom took out a credit card, but before she could put it on the little black plastic tray, Grandma, with her Mr. Fantastic arm, grabbed the check. Then Dad, with his super-ripped, Incredible Hulk arm grabbed it. Crystal was reapplying her metallic lavender lipstick, and the loser was laying his head, face down, on his crossed arms. Well anyway, Dad looked at the check and handed it back to Mom. Mom gave the credit card, tray, and check to the waitress and said something in Korean to Grandma. She then told Dad, “I asked Mom to come and look at our place. She hasn’t seen this one yet.”

  Dad nodded. And for the first time, Grandma, who was reapplying her dark pink lipstick, looked tired. I never saw her look tired before. I understand though, I get that tired too sometimes. Mom gets worried when I stay in my room all day long on weekends sometimes. Luckily, Dad is paddling a lot on weekends, or he’d drag me out of my room. He hates when I get tired.

  Well, the check came, the loser and Crystal left, with no kiss this time, it was like they were in a hurry, and I watched Crystal bounce away while Mom gave the waitress three twenties. Dad frowned and said, “That’s like nineteen percent.”

  Mom ignored him, which she always did when he mentioned money. As we got up to walk out, Dad told Grandma, “You should talk to your daughter. She’s too careless with money.”

  “You listen, Kenny,” Grandma said. “You listen husband.”

  “When you pay, you can tip whatever you want, husband.”

  They were going to start again. It’s like when you get old, it’s all about making and spending money and complaining about it twenty-four seven. Money’s cool and all, but jeez. I mean, when Dad gave me an Ameritrade account on the Internet last year, with three thousand dollars of buying power, I was stoked. I mean, I made a killing on Cisco and Harcourt, but to tell you the truth, I’d rather be playing Everquest or Final Fantasy VIII. But I guess Ameritrade is like Dad’s computer game.

  I feel bad for Mom, though, when he gets on her about money. Sometimes he gets mean. He’ll say stuff like, “That’s what I get for marrying a Korean barmaid,” or “Why did I marry a Waikiki novelty peddler?” I mean, she’ll remind him that she was a bartender when they met, or that she sells designer stuff in her shop, but it has no effect on him. Once the big guy gets rolling, get out of the way. It got especially bad when I made the mistake of printing out an IQ test from the Internet, and we all took it. Mom kicked our asses. I didn’t care too much, to be honest, I tanked it a little, I mean, if I score well, the next thing you know, the folks will expect you to bring home straight A’s, but Dad didn’t take it too well. I think it especially bothered him because the test was in English, or as Mom sometimes calls it when she slips, “Engrish,” her second language, and it made him feel even dumber. Poor guy.

  So anyway, I blanked out their money conversation in Dad’s S.U.V., or tried to, and thought about Crystal bouncing. But from what I did hear, it was pretty tame, Grandma being in the car and all. Grandma was checking her make-up and keeping quiet. I wondered if Mom and Dad would get a divorce. Whatever. As long as they don’t blame me for staying together. That’s so lame.

  THE DEATH OF KWANG JA

  chapter two

  -1-

  IN 1952 Cho Kwang Ja walked from a village in North Korea to Seoul. She walked over a hundred miles. That summer, in the sometimes one-hundred-plus-degree heat, her skin baked to a nice, golden brown. Her tiny and bare fourteen-year-old feet developed calluses so thick that they were tougher than the bottom of most people’s sandals. She stepped on sharp, jagged rocks and hardly noticed. She stepped on leftover pieces of shrapnel and didn’t even feel it. Once she stopped to sit down, and she looked at the bottoms of her feet. She smiled and pulled out the tiny shards of metal. She didn’t care. She just wanted to get out of dry, mountainous country. She wanted to see tall buildings, green mountains, and people with shoes. She wanted to get out of Communist Korea.

  She wasn’t a political person. If it were the Communists who were running Seoul, she would have embraced Communism without a second thought. She wasn’t a religious person either. Despite her poor education which left her barely literate, she sensed early in her childhood that religion was used by bigger people to get what they wanted from smaller ones. Confucianism was an example. As was Christianity. Before the white missionaries in the north were finally burnt out by the Communists, she’d seen some of these foreign holy men get what they wanted from young girls using their religion. When Confucianism and Buddhism were outlawed by the Communists, she saw how their religions did not help the priests. Her atheism may have pushed her towards Communism if Communism did not prove as useless to her as God did.

  So Cho Kwang Ja was neither political nor religious. But she was ambitious. Ambition drove her over hundreds of miles of dirt roads and rocky, bald, mountainous terrain. Ambition forced her to live on nothing but dirty water and the leaves of plants she could not even identify. And not only that, ambition made her smart. too. She hid whenever she came close to any human contact. Villagers, soldiers, both North and South Korean, were stealthily avoided. She did a lot of her traveling by night to better her chances of not being detected by anyone. Sometimes, during days, she would sleep in the burnt-out skeletons of American or Russian tanks or shot-down planes. But most of the time, she didn’t sleep. Ambition kept her awake, too.

  Kwang Ja didn’t even know where Seoul was, except that it was south. A missionary had once told her that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, and ambition forced her to hold on to that piece of information like it was a piece of perfect jade. So every morning she looked up at the sun and smiled when she knew which direction south was. Then she’d tell herself she’d know Seoul when she saw it. It would be big with a lot of people. It would be a place where American GIs drove around in their beautiful green jeeps, a place with riches oozing out of great buildings. A place that big and magical, as long as she kept walking south, she could never miss. How naive she was.

  It wasn’t until years later that she knew that she’d owed luck more than ambition for the successful trip. Crossing the thirty-eighth parallel without even knowing it, and accidentally locating and following the Han River, which turned more and more brown further into her journey, she walked right into Seoul. Besides, her ambition wasn’t really ambition. She had no real goals. She didn’t know what she wanted to be. She didn’t even really know what money or success were. Instead, what drove her through the long walk was part hunger and part fear. She was hungry for something different, and she was running from something too sadly familiar.

  Cho Kwang Ja was a half-breed. Before her adopted mother had died of lung disease, she’d
told Kwang Ja that her real mother was with her in the recreation camps of the Japanese army during the occupation. She told Kwang Ja that her father was a cruel Japanese soldier. When Kwang Ja had asked for a specific name and description, her adopted mother only scowled. “Foolish child. They all wore the same cruel mask to us.” Then she’d coughed herself unconscious.

  Kwang Ja’s mother had been a comfort woman, a Korean peasant forced into sex slavery. But Kwang Ja was six when she was told this, and she did not see the significance. She simply stored it in the soft, spongy part of her mind and watched her adopted mother die.

  But on her fourteenth birthday, she’d remembered. She’d finally known, just by looking in the mirror on her fourteenth birthday, that there was a touch of Japanese that contaminated her blood. The narrowness of her face, the subtle difference in the shape of her eyes. To her, her eyes were a darker brown—almost black and all pupil— than anyone else she had seen (though this was not a Japanese trait, she thought its rareness would draw attention to her, followed by questions). She couldn’t believe it. Maybe it was because before turning fourteen, she could never see things objectively; maybe it was because her birthday was the first time she’d seen a mirror in two years, but whatever it was, she now knew. Though others did not seem to notice, like she didn’t during all of her childhood, she wasn’t going to wait around until they did. It was a bad thing to be part Japanese or part anything but Korean in North Korea. The memories of the people, even in her small village, were long. Communism in the North represented for many the cure for the disease of Western imperialism and the monstrosities of Japanese occupation. That night, she walked out of the village with nothing, except for her fear and the knowledge that she should never stay in one place for too long because sooner or later she would be discovered. It would be a year before she would realize that her brown eyes were just as brown as anyone else’s, and her sudden awareness of her uniqueness had nothing to do with blood, but had everything to do with adolescence and beauty.