I'm Ok

by Patti Kim

  “Asa! Charming, but would you please read what you’ve written—” Ms. Lincoln says, but the bell rings.

  Everyone scrambles to leave. As I pack up, I’m puzzled and intrigued. Why didn’t Asa read his essay? Was he embarrassed? There was nothing embarrassing about it. It was a good and humorous essay. Why didn’t he show off as usual and read it out loud? Can’t Asa Banks read?

  As I walk out of the classroom, I pick up Asa’s crumpled-up paper out of the trash and stuff it into my pocket, wondering who wrote it for him.

  On the bus ride home I fantasize about what to do with my discovery. Blackmail. Extortion. Those Nikes would do just fine, probably three sizes too big, but I’ll grow into them. I can’t believe my luck. I know Asa Banks’s deep, dark secret. He can’t read and write. I chuckle, but I feel embarrassed for him. How did he make it to sixth grade? How did he get to be this old and not know how to read and write? He never read a book, not even a comic book? He can’t read a cereal box. He can’t make sense of a grocery list, street signs, and how so-and-so did it with so-and-so scribbled on the toilet stalls. He’s never written anything, except maybe his name. Good thing it’s short.

  Asa has spent the whole year making my life miserable, but suddenly I feel sorry for him. He has no idea what he’s missing out on. Or maybe he has an inkling but thinks it’s too late to learn. My fantasies of blackmailing him turn to fantasies of teaching him how to read and write, which make me feel warm and generous inside, like I’m Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. all rolled up into one. This for sure would count as turning the other cheek. I fantasize about being best buds with him. We hang out, shoot some hoops, punch each other in the arm, but not too hard, and fart in front of each other and laugh about it. We laugh a lot. We laugh until our eyes water and our stomachs hurt and we piss in our pants. Stop. Stop. You’re killing me, Asa. You all right, Ok.

  eighteen

  When I get home from school, I find my mother at the kitchen table, reading a letter. It’s on tissue-thin par avion paper. Korean scribbles fill the sheets from top to bottom and side to side with no margins to spare. The letter looks like an ancient document holding secret messages. I walk into the kitchen to get a drink of water. My mother sighs, puts the letter down, and asks, “Ok-ah, do you want to move back to Korea?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?” I ask.

  “No,” she says.

  “Then I don’t want to either,” I say.

  My mother crumples up the letter, throws it into the trash, goes to her bedroom, and shuts the door.

  I check our phone to see if we have service. She must’ve paid the bill, because the dial tone is back. I’m tempted to take the phone off the hook just in case Korea decides to call. The good part about having our phone service cut off was that we couldn’t take calls from Korea. Soon after my father died, we got a lot of calls, most of them collect. They were very expensive. My mother couldn’t deny the charges. I guess she couldn’t say no to the mother of her dead husband, my grandmother. The early calls were sad. Then the calls got angry. She yelled at my mother, blaming her for her son’s death. The later calls demanded money. My grandmother was convinced my mother had struck it rich from a life insurance policy. How else would she be paying for all her collect calls? Those calls made me feel relieved we were so far away.

  My other grandparents were nicer about the whole thing. They didn’t call collect. There was a lot of crying, but it was the sad kind of crying, not angry. They even asked for me. When I got on the phone, my grandmother asked if I remembered her. I said yes. Her voice sounded familiar like Ŏmma’s, but deeper. She asked, “Don’t you want to come home?” I said yes. When my grandfather got on the phone, he told me I was the man of the house now and to take care of my mother. I said yes. The calls ended with them telling us to come back to Korea, where we belonged, there was nothing for us in America, nothing but heartache and suffering and silence. I said yes.

  My mother cries in the bedroom. I don’t know what keeps her here. My grandparents want us to come back to Korea. She wouldn’t have to work so hard. She wouldn’t have to worry about ending up in a stranger’s basement or homeless under a bridge. I’d get new clothes and shoes. We’d get plenty to eat. All our problems would disappear. Going back to Korea would be the easy thing to do. But just because something is easy doesn’t mean it should be done. That was something Ms. Mason, my second-grade teacher, used to say.

  I retrieve the letter from the trash, smooth it out, and try to decipher the message, but my Korean isn’t good enough. Remembering Ms. Mason, I start folding the letter into an origami flower. She taught the class how to make a boat, a fox, and a frog with nothing but a sheet of paper. No scissors. No glue. No tape. It was like magic. Ms. Mason saw how much I got into it and taught me how to fold a flower. When I did the last steps of blowing into it and peeling down the petals, she said, “I know why you’re so good at this. It’s because you’re so good at math. This is geometry in action.”

  Ms. Mason was my favorite teacher. She had a special saying for almost every occasion. “Get yourself to the bathroom before your eyeballs float.” “If you’ve got the blues, dance it right off.” “It’s not about the getting, it’s about the giving.” She called nap time “playing possum.” Imagine that. Those were her two favorite words: “imagine that.” And she had a nickname for every kid in the class. She called me Okay. You know where that expression comes from? It was originally Greek, meaning “all good.” Imagine that.

  I put my ear against my mother’s door. She isn’t crying anymore. I don’t know the whole story, but here’s what I’ve pieced together: My grandparents didn’t want their only child to marry my father because they believed he was a loser. Never finished high school. Spent too much time singing in bars. Too ambitious for his lowly talents and skills. No discipline. Thought too highly of himself. Smoked and drank too much. Lazy. And his ears had no lobes. No lobes meant no luck. When I was born, my grandparents came around to accepting the marriage. But then there was talk of moving to America. My grandparents didn’t want us to leave the country. They forbade it. My father moved us anyway.

  I think my mother feels embarrassed to go back. Returning to Korea means admitting she was wrong, that all the big decisions she made for her life and her family were bad ones. She failed. She has something to prove to herself and her family. She wants to be able to hold her head high. Returning a poor widow is not allowed. She’d rather end up hungry and homeless than give in to their I told you so. I respect that, and I don’t.

  I return to the kitchen to take the phone off the hook. As I lift the receiver off, I hear ringing on the other end. My mother is making a phone call in her bedroom. The deacon’s voice answers. Then my mother responds in her singsongy voice, “Hello? Am I calling too late?”

  I hang up.

  nineteen

  Deacon Koh picks my mother and me up in my father’s Cougar to take us out to a Chinese restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner. A tree-shaped air freshener dangles on the rearview mirror, trying hard to mask any previous odors, but I can still smell my father’s cigarettes.

  There are times when I forget my father is gone. I don’t know why, since almost every detail of my life has changed since we lost him. But sometimes when I’m sitting in class, or braiding hair while listening to a girl talk about her troubles, or just looking out the window, I have to remind myself that I don’t have a father. Those moments don’t last long. I wish I could forget right now because there are too many reminders here.

  My father loved this car. He loved driving fast. He’d speed along George Washington Parkway, his favorite road, with me in the passenger seat. The windows would be rolled down all the way, our arms out, riding the beating wind like a pair of wings. My father would stick his head out and shout, “Manse!” I’d follow along and shout, “Manse,” which means “ten thousand years.” You say it when you’re having such an amazing moment that you want it to last for a long time.

&nbs
p; A folded towel covers the driver’s seat. As Koh helps my mother into the car, I lift a corner of the towel to see what’s hiding underneath. A big fat copy of the Yellow Pages. Koh needs to sit on thousands of sheets of paper in order to fit into my father’s sports car.

  Wedged between the windshield and the dashboard is a black leather-bound Bible. There are no loose nails on the floor, no tar-covered work gloves, no cigarette butts and ashes in the ashtray. The Cougar has been cleaned out. The absence of these details makes me remember them more. And Koh has cleaned himself up for the occasion, wearing a light-blue dress shirt, a necktie, pants with razor-sharp creases, and polished brown leather shoes. I detect Old Spice. Even though he looks and smells church-approved, I don’t trust him. I’d take my father’s tar, cigarettes, and Johnnie Walker over Koh’s pine-scented fake tree any old day.

  Koh snaps on his seat belt and asks my mother to do the same. My father never wore his seat belt. He didn’t believe in them. She pulls on the belt and looks for the buckle. Koh reaches over, dislodges it from the seat, and holds it steady while my mother locks in the tongue. Click. Just like the sound of the dead bolt on our door to keep thieves from breaking and entering. Is Deacon Koh a crook? Is he scheming to steal my mother away?

  Their hands touch.

  “Deacon, you’re very careful,” she says.

  “Of course. I have to be when I have passengers who are VIP. Do you know what ‘VIP’ stands for?” he asks, raising his voice and looking at me in the rearview mirror.

  I want to tell him boo-ee is not a letter in the English alphabet. V is pronounced vee, not boo-ee. To make the V sound, don’t make kissy lips. Instead bite down on your lower lip. Vee.

  “No,” I lie, and look out the window.

  “No problemo. I’ll tell you. It’s ‘very important people,’ ” he says slowly.

  What a jackass. His short tongue is trying too hard to sound American, and “very important people” comes out as “belly impotent peeper.” By the way, “VIP” stands for “very important person,” not “peeper.”

  “It actually stands for ‘very important person,’ but since there are you and your son here, I changed ‘person’ to ‘people.’ ‘Person’ is used for one. ‘People’ is used for more than one,” he instructs, and chuckles, so very pleased with himself. “Am I right, Ok?” he asks, looking for me in the rearview mirror.

  “What?” I say, trying not to vomit.

  “I was just teaching your mother here some English. Your mother told me English is your best subject at school. She said you enjoy reading and writing. That’s very good. They’re important skills. But do you know what subject is more important?” he asks, clicking on the turn signal.

  “Math,” I say, hoping to shut him up.

  But he keeps talking about how math is the foundation to all progress in civilization, how it’s the language of logic, how he has a math degree, how math is what builds bridges, sends rockets to space, gives us clean water, blah, blah, blah. He says, “God is in math. Oh sure. The concept of infinity. That is God.”

  This equation comes to mind: Appa > Koh.

  I stare out the window. We drive past my father’s dream house. It’s a big old abandoned house with boarded-up windows, a collapsing porch, a chimney big enough to fit Santa, and ivy shrouding its walls. It looks haunted. It’s condemned and ought to be bulldozed, I heard. My father wanted it. We walked by that house many times. My mother thought he was crazy and never came along. Once, we even walked around it, making our way through the tall weeds as my father inspected its structure. He said it was a strong house with a solid foundation, they didn’t make houses like this anymore, it was worth investing in, could very well be the ticket to his success in the USA. He wanted to buy it, fix it up, live in it, then sell it. He’d start with the roof.

  We are getting on the highway. As gears shift, the Cougar jerks and picks up speed. The engine sounds the same, like the growl of a big cat. I look out the window. With most of the leaves gone from the trees, I can see the orange sky through the mesh of branches. The sun is setting. Cars pass. People are on their way to Thanksgiving dinners. Last Sunday at church Pastor Chung preached that if we felt sad, we should count our blessings. Make a list of all the things we were grateful for. Not focus on what was lost. Focus on what was found. I’m grateful for trees and how their roots keep the earth from crumbling apart. I’m grateful leaves grow back every spring and that they burn bright with colorful splendor right before they fall. I’m grateful for the sky, how it goes on forever, defying time and space. I’m grateful my mother’s ankle is healing. I’m grateful for Mickey’s laugh. I’m grateful I can ride in my father’s car again. I’m grateful that even though I sometimes try to forget, I still remember him. My wish to forget only means I miss him.

  I remember how my father used to say his most favorite parts of the fish were the head and tail, and he’d devour them enthusiastically, leaving the middle portion for me and Ŏmma. I used to believe the head and tail were his favorite parts, but looking back now, I wonder. I wonder if he was just pretending to like them so we didn’t feel so badly about getting the best part.

  I remember how he’d sit in a circle with his friends and play hwat’u, a Korean card game, among cans of beer and cigarettes. Once, he let me sit on his lap. He let me throw down a card. He let me take a sip of his beer. When I grimaced at the taste, he laughed.

  I remember when my father and I were at a bank together, making a deposit. The bank teller was dressed in a shirt and tie and wore a plastic name tag. His name was Charles. He had on a gold watch. His fingernails were clean. I asked my father if he’d be proud of me if I became a bank teller, and he looked down at me and said, “I’m already proud of you.”

  I remember the weight of his hand on my back, as he patted me for doing something right, like translating a letter from the bank for him or making a phone call inquiring about a credit card application for him or writing a letter to the landlord about a window that wouldn’t open because it had been painted shut by the previous tenants. He’d smile and pat my back, his pride and gratitude in my abilities superseding any embarrassment about his own limitations.

  I remember how he sang Korean love songs and how my mother would join in. When she forgot the lyrics, he’d feed them to her, and the two of them would finish the song together.

  I remember how he used to tell me this one Korean folktale about the disobedient frog, and how he made his mother suffer so much by his naughty ways that she died and ended up being buried near a stream, so the frog sat nearby and guarded her, croaking his sadness and regret. And my father would end the story complaining about Koreans and our unhealthy attachment to suffering. He’d ask, “Why can’t the frog and his mother live happily ever after?”

  When the food arrives, Koh bows his head, closes his eyes, and prays, “Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you for the nourishing food you’ve placed before us. May we grow in faith and love for you, especially young Ok. May he grow in your strength and grace. May we become like a family, true children of God. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.”

  I open my eyes, wondering why the man couldn’t have said grace before the food arrived, before the smell of shrimp fried rice could taunt and torture me. I’m starving. My mouth waters. I want to scoop chunks of sweet-and-sour pork into my mouth. I wait for my mother to be served first. Koh handles the platter of sweet-and-sour pork like he’s in slow motion. I finally get some on my plate and take a bite, and instantly all is well. I don’t even mind that Koh stuffs his cheeks like a squirrel and that my mother daintily picks at her food like she’s the queen of England when I know she wants to dig in like a peasant. I’m grateful for sweet-and-sour pork. I’m grateful for the big, noisy Chinese family at the table in the corner; otherwise, it would be more English lessons with Koh.

  “Ah, Ok has a good appetite,” Koh says.

  “Slow down,” my mother says.

  “The secret to good digestion
is thoroughly chewing your food,” he says.

  I spoon rice into my mouth and swallow.

  “How does your school go?” Koh asks in English.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Nobody bother you?” he asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Nobody bother me, either,” he says, and winks like Jhoon Rhee’s son in the tae kwon do commercial.

  I stuff my mouth with more rice and swallow. As I keep food in my mouth, because it would be rude to talk with my mouth full, I wonder if I can do some kind of martial arts demonstration for the talent show. I’ve watched enough Bruce Lee to know how the moves go. Kick, punch, make some karate sounds, do some cartwheels, break a board. It’s all about putting on a show. The school probably already thinks I’m a black belt anyway, since I’m “Oriental,” and all “Orientals” train in martial arts. I don’t want to play into the stereotype. Maybe I’ll polka instead.

  The check arrives. I take a peek at the total and wonder how many heads of hair I’d need to braid to afford such a meal. A lot. Along with the check, there are three fortune cookies, which remind me of Mickey’s joke. My mother places one cookie in front of each of us. As Koh pulls out his bulging black wallet full of cash and cards, I break the cookie. I nearly scoff out loud when I read my fortune. “You are among the best of friends,” it says.

  Koh places three twenties on the little plastic tray and thumbs through the wallet as if counting his bills. He pulls out a photograph and gazes upon it fondly. He shows my mother the photograph. She politely smiles, nods, and says, “How very intelligent looking.” He shows me the photo, which turns out to be of a dog with long, floppy brown ears and a white wishbone of fur running down the middle of his face. This is his dog. Deacon Koh has a dog. I can’t believe he has a dog. I want a dog. He’s a beagle named Lassie.