A History of Scars

by Laura Lee

  After he lowered he acknowledged that we lent him belief, that he’d surprised himself by sending. I remember him talking about the “good energy, the people,” how everything had felt right.

  I’ve been both the one benefiting from good vibes and the cheerleader helping others send. It just depends on relative experience and the moment.

  Climbing and writing aren’t dissimilar in that the value in both is inherently noncommercial, nonmonetary. In both we do what we need to get by on the expertise we’ve accumulated, through pain and effort and mistakes. In both it’s the act itself that matters—the hours spent working, for the sake of the motion itself.

  Sometimes the best beta to get is from someone of similar height and build. Sometimes the only way to persevere is by looking for guidance from those who’ve already traversed the same paths, who’ve already battled through crux sequences and found their way to safety.

  Both activities are asynchronous to modern society. For all but the rare few, acts like climbing and writing become the medicine that allow us to function, rather than the meat and potatoes on which we subsist. Only the lucky and gifted can sustain themselves on such acts.

  The best mentors are the ones who don’t need anything—who opt in, regardless. They lend belief when none is in sight, when self-generation of such confidence is difficult to near impossible.

  It’s clear when mentorship stems from pure motivations. Rather than trying to stake claims to their own greatness through association, these mentors provoke genuine gratitude without demanding such in return. They’re givers.

  * * *

  In certain climbing areas, technical ones like Jackson Falls, where sections are blank of holds, moves can feel impossible, until you shift your way of thinking slightly. Once you reconsider your body position, the placement of your feet, what sort of a move you’re going for, what you consider a hold, suddenly the move can feel effortless.

  Essayists have mainly the material of our own lives to work with. Piecing together shredded narratives can feel like an act of desperation. As we examine our own faults and mistakes, it feels akin to drowning in the pressure to convert carbon to diamonds.

  In working an essay I feel the moves out as I would a climb. Hips in, or hips out? Body square to the wall, or body crouched down low? It’s the maneuvering that feels good—becoming aware of parts of your body you didn’t know existed, or alternatively, parts of your mind and thinking.

  You can only climb or write hard when you’ve put fear and panic at the consequences of failing aside. As you focus instead on discovering what’s required to succeed—the small gains rather than the big throws—solutions start emerging.

  A typical climbing routine outdoors might be two days on, one day off; two days on, two days off. After a few weeks, climbing can cross from a joyous activity to a monotonous one. Physical and mental exhaustion accumulate. After a few weeks, those rest days can become the real highlight. Writing days are equally grueling. It’s the disruption of time away that allows for progress, both in physical exercise, where super-compensation dictates that we become worse before we return stronger, and in writing, where our desires to communicate hop-step beyond our technical skills.

  Support from others helps, but writing is fundamentally a solitary task—one both publicly performed and privately practiced. Away from performance and deadline pressure, what re-invigorates is that rediscovery of pleasure for its own sake. No one can take away the hard-earned wisdom of training on one’s own, of pushing past doubt. There’s no substitute for that feeling. The reward is in finding new pathways, as we expand our visions of possibility.

  Just as in climbing, when the foundation isn’t strong, the essay isn’t going to work. It’s obvious when you’re flailing, when you’re hoping hope will be enough. It rarely is. Similarly when you’ve set up correctly, when you’re going to land the move, you know it.

  When soaring, both feel the same. There’s the moment, after having accumulated enough technique, after letting go of self-consciousness—when the motion becomes instinct. When no one else’s voice matters. When the motion becomes a way of returning to quietness, to oneself.

  6 DEPARTURE

  The emotion I most strongly associate with my father is anger. And yet when I accompanied him to the local Social Security office in Colorado, what I saw instead was vulnerability. I’d agreed to help him apply for spousal benefits during a brief visit home, years after I’d filed for my mother’s benefits, when I was twenty-four or twenty-five. Because my mother received Social Security disability payments due to early-onset Alzheimer’s, my father was eligible to receive monthly payments of one-half her benefit amount.

  I’d finally convinced him that he should apply for spousal benefits when he mentioned casually that wheat bread was too expensive to buy, and so he had been buying white bread instead.

  “I don’t like it, but I can’t afford wheat,” he told me, as we stood in our kitchen, lined with yellow linoleum. “It’s two dollars more per loaf.” He shook his head.

  I preferred only returning to my childhood home when my father was elsewhere, in Korea. On a rare occasion when I visited with a friend, my friend told me my father and I avoided each other whenever we were both within the house, something I hadn’t noticed on my own. It was true, though; we followed elliptical paths, attempting to prevent collisions.

  Despite our differences, in that moment of discussing bread, I was struck by sadness. Poverty was so entrenched as part of my father’s identity. As a family, we could have afforded wheat bread, but he didn’t feel he could. He didn’t regard my mother’s financial resources as shared, especially given her condition. And he himself had accumulated very little in the form of life savings. So he chose to continue downsizing his quality of life, rather than ask for help.

  We drove over to our appointment in our family’s maroon Honda Civic. Our car was so old and broken that I had tied red ribbon around the windshield wiper lever and secured it with Scotch tape to the steering wheel, to keep it pulled up in its place. Driving required a gentle touch. He insisted on driving.

  When hitting bumps in the road, occasionally the lever would jigger loose, and the wiper blades would fly furiously across the windshield until the driver repositioned the lever gently into its notch. Accelerating required physical effort, too, in pushing the resistant pedal down slowly, slowly toward the mat.

  Visiting from New York City, where all government offices that I had entered were broken-down, grim affairs, I thought the small office presented the brightest possible picture of local government at work. The square, squat building was efficient, clean, filled with sun, and spacious. There were even happy, smiling employees, to boot.

  After checking in with the security guard, we were quickly ushered into the cubicle-lined back-office area. The woman conducting our interview was white, with long brown hair, and of average height. She looked so innocent and fresh. I imagined her to be a newlywed, someone who was passionate about helping others. I remember few other details about her, except that at certain moments throughout the interview, I felt her respond to my father with suspicion.

  I had dug up my parents’ marriage certificate from the ugly brown cabinet in their bedroom where they kept such things. I had armed myself with a manila folder containing his Social Security card, passports, my mother’s tax return, disability application, and other such documents. Even with those forms, the woman kept asking for things we didn’t have.

  “Can I see a copy of your birth certificate?” she asked.

  My father explained that he did not have one, for complicated reasons relating to the Korean War, lack of record keeping in South Korea, and his parents’ short-term relocation to China.

  This, I could see, confused her. As did the idea that his income statements were written in Korean, because he had lived there for the majority of each year until retirement, and needed to be translated to English. Each question became more taxing, because of the details of his nontr
aditional American life.

  “You’ve been eligible since your birthday. Why didn’t you apply earlier?” she asked.

  I had wondered the same thing. I had told my father many times that he should apply, but in typical stubborn style, he had insisted that it might not be a good idea. In his thick, guttural English, he explained haltingly to her that he thought he needed to wait. At the suspicious look on her face, I jumped in to explain that he hadn’t known what to do. She seemed suspicious as to whether his vulnerability was an act.

  When I’d filed my mother’s application for disability, her future had been uncertain. Her application had required doctor involvement, and the approval process was opaque. Failing to receive funds would’ve been disastrous—she’d already been forced into early retirement, and the funds were acutely needed. She herself was past the point of comprehension, and she needed someone else to intercede on her behalf.

  With my father, the barriers to aid were constructed by him. I had told him he would receive one-half benefits; the guidelines were quite clear. But he persisted in fearing that perhaps he might need to wait. He had been eligible since his birthday, but he had been afraid to go.

  He had always been this way—somewhat hapless in America. He was wildly intellectual, but he spoke in English with a heavy accent, and he’d never learned to speak in English without a degree of hesitation. This left him unable to be understood by impatient servers at restaurants, unable to call plumbers on his own, unable to manage finances, or complete other normal activities of living.

  Of course, his personality played a large role in this learned helplessness, as well. He constructed walls around himself, refusing to ask for help when he needed it. He was suspicious of strangers, distrustful of lawyers, and deeply protective of his privacy.

  When salespeople called our home in the evenings, as they often do in suburban settings, my father never learned to react calmly. Instead, he grew agitated. Each time he picked up the handset, the trajectory was familiar. “Hello? Hello? Yes, who is this? Where did you get this number? Why are you calling me? Don’t call here again! Do you hear? Don’t call again!”

  At first he sounded uncertain; by the end he would be screaming. After he hung up on the poor salesperson, he would mutter darkly, frowning. I tried to explain that it wasn’t worth getting so angry about; that this was their job, that screaming accomplished nothing. But my father had established his patterns in life. His reaction to any perceived lack of control was a hot temper. In his strongly held sense of personal ethics, the salespeople were clearly encroaching on his rights.

  We somehow made it through the woman’s questions, and we walked out with a printout, explaining the lump sum he would receive for six months prior, months in which he’d been eligible to receive benefits he hadn’t claimed. I remember his smile of relief when we got home. I’d rarely seen him so happy. I understood it as the freedom from worry that financial security offered.

  Despite all our differences, our long-entrenched estrangement, for a moment I felt as though we’d endured something together. We’d triumphed, for once. Our relationship was no better than it had been before, but at least he could return to eating whole wheat bread, buying Gruyère cheese in ten-pound slabs from the local wholesale warehouse, and picking up the occasional book from the local bookstore. Those were, and are, his ideas of splurges.

  My father and I know next to nothing of each other’s life, then and now, but my family has always been tied together by pragmatic concerns—by finances, by illness, by need.

  * * *

  For most of my life, my parents were ciphers. My parents were individuals who had to be understood on their own terms, rather than as a unit. I never learned their origin story, of how they came to be a couple. They confided separately their complaints about each other and their marriage, but not the happier moments. They tended not to speak positively of each other.

  From my mother I learned that my father had accidentally landed at the best university in South Korea, due to some administrative chaos caused by the Korean War. This fact grated at my mother, who considered herself much harder working, but who hadn’t experienced such luck.

  “He’s smart,” my mother said often, bitterly. She often spoke of him as the smarter one, disregarding her own status as the breadwinner, the one who handled real-life concerns.

  As for my father, at a bar where he drank cheap beer and chewed on spicy wings, he told me once, “I should’ve married someone like your mother’s sister, instead.” By this he meant he should’ve married someone without my mother’s “temper,” as he put it—a comical complaint, given his own instant-flare, white-hot personality.

  Only in searching the most mothballed corners of memory do I find any memories of my parents in what could be construed as happier times, or engaging in social activities. I rarely saw them interact with others, never saw them express affection publicly. Strangers were rarely invited into our large, empty suburban house.

  On rare occasions when my parents hosted a party, my father retrieved a few dusty Heineken bottles, coated with drips of white wax, from the kitchen pantry where they were housed. He stuck white candlesticks into the green bottles, so the long tapers stuck out at lopsided angles. The cardboard lid of a Domino’s pizza box would serve as the backdrop for a board game, on which he drew shapes, and the adults gathered around and played. Small wooden sticks completed the game, or perhaps served to keep score. As with so many other parts of my parents’ lives, the games were mysterious.

  My mother might fill a metal leaf-shaped tray with nuts and put out a cheese ball, too, the size of a grapefruit. Certain aspects of American entertaining, as with cheese balls, seemed to fascinate her. Other elements of her own upbringing she retained—bringing out orange persimmons or yellow Korean melon or purple seeded Kyoho grapes or mandarin oranges for dessert. It was as though they were playing at entertaining, assembling their own rule book.

  There was nothing classy or sophisticated about their gatherings, but the company was a welcome interruption from the seclusion of our lives. Beyond these rare interruptions, other adults almost never appeared in our house. My parents seemed to exist mostly in a vacuum, context-less, as a result, without reference points beyond their interactions with and comments about each other. I wonder still if their isolation was geographically imposed, by virtue of having so few neighboring Korean- or Asian-Americans with whom they might share a common background, or whether it was intentional and self-chosen.

  * * *

  When I was a child, before he departed for Korea, my father had short spurts of energy, in which he would playact at being a father figure, trialing out some idea or another on us. He left cooking to my mother. If anything, he brought us to McDonald’s or Burger King, where he would eat a burger and we would eat fries, but once he took me to the grocery store and lectured me on what I should buy. He told me, “If I give you a dollar, you should buy apples with it, not candy bars.”

  As another lesson to me, he donated, unbeknownst to me, a cherished stuffed animal that I’d been gifted, a soft and furry and fancy rabbit. When I returned to my room, the stuffed animal had disappeared. The intended lesson had been something about how it’s better to give than receive.

  In sports, too, he had ideas. We had a battered copy of Steffi Graf’s biography lying around in one of the many bookcases in our house, and he encouraged my middle sister and me to read it. Like her, he seemed to want us to be tennis champions. His muse seemed to be Steffi Graf’s strict father. He encouraged us to practice forehand and backhand swings in the air, twenty-five to a hundred times each, if possible. When an uncle visited from Korea, he, too, wanted to see our tennis swings. The only problem was that neither my sister nor I liked tennis much at all. Nor were we natural talents.

  We lasted for one unwilling stint at tennis day camp, where we practiced our serves, where I tried to even out my toss, throwing the fuzzy ball high above my head, time and again. After that either our lack o
f talent or our apathy became apparent, and we stopped the tennis experiment. Instead my middle sister and I watched my mother and father on occasions when they played, serving as their ball girls by ducking at the white net midcourt before chasing down balls.

  Sports were my father’s domain. On this passion he and I overlapped, although we still failed to speak a common language. I preferred playing basketball, a sport in which he tried to instruct me. Never mind that he himself didn’t know how to play—he was worse than I at making a basket. When we stood on the downward slope of our driveway, where I’d somehow convinced my parents to install a hoop, his gait was awkward. His knee bends were overexaggerated and ill-coordinated with his upward push, his elbows sticking out sideways at odd angles as he tried to shove the ball toward the net, at a sharp angle rather than an elegant swoosh. He hadn’t learned from any coaches himself; his form was terrible. It didn’t matter. For a brief period, he accompanied me to basketball games. He couldn’t help coaching me post-games, with his tick-list of all the errors he’d seen me make throughout the game. Afterward, until I was left in tears from all the errors he’d point out, he’d say, “You’re doing this wrong. You need to do it like this.”

  Mostly, though, the lessons I learned from my father revolved around isolation—how to exist in wilderness, how to thrive in it. Unlike his other experiments, trips outdoors were a routine aspect of his lifestyle. The mountains beckoned. He’d grown up near them in Korea, always escaping on some adventure. If we weren’t headed toward the mountains to hike, we were on a road trip to some national park, to some patch of nature. We went most often to Wyoming, where mosquitos the size of dragonflies congregated on the tarp of our cheap green family tent. We bypassed motels in favor of tents nearly always.