Of course, that’s ridiculous. First, it’s what she does. She does everything else too, but her first imperative is to cook for us. It’s how she shapes our days and masters us and shows us her displeasure, her weariness, her love. She’ll hail my sister and me from the narrow kitchen window, calling out our names and adding that dinner’s on—Bap muh-guh!—the particular register of her voice instantly sailing to us through the hot murk and chaos of the playground. It’s as if we had special receptors, vestigial ears in our bellies. There’s a quickening, a sudden hop in the wrong direction: I gotta go! My mother is becoming notorious among the kids; they’ll whine, with scorn and a note of envy, Hey, your mom’s always calling you! And one big-framed, older girl named Kathy, who has sparkling jade-colored eyes and a prominent, bulging forehead that makes her look like a dolphin, viciously bullies me about it, taunting me, saying that I eat all the time, that I’m going to be a tub o’ lard, that I love my mother too much. I say it’s not true, though I fear it is. Plus, I’m terrified of Kathy, who on other days will tenderly pat my head and even hug me, telling me I’m cute, before suddenly clamping my ear, pinching harder and harder until my knees buckle; once she even makes me lob curses up at our kitchen window, words so heinous that they might as well be rocks. I remember my mother poking her head out and peering down, her expression tight, confused, most of all fearful of what I might be saying, and immediately I sob. Kathy sweetly tells her that I’m hungry. My mother, who understands little English and is maybe scared of this girl too, softly orders me to come in, then pulls in the casement window.
Once I’m upstairs, she offers me a snack—cookies, kimbap, a bowl of hot watery rice, which I eat with tiny squares of ham or leftover bulgogi, one spoon at a time. I eat while watching her cook. If she’s not cleaning or laundering, she’s cooking. Every so often, she’ll make a point of telling me she hates it, that she no longer wants to bother but she has to because we must save money. We can’t waste money eating out. My father is a newly minted psychiatrist, but his salary at the Bronx VA hospital is barely respectable, and we have no savings, no family in this country, no safety net. We dine out maybe four times a year, three of those for Chinese (there are no Korean restaurants yet), and the rest of the time my mother is at the stove—breakfast, lunch, dinner, as well as making snacks for us midmorning and afternoon, and then late at night for my father when he gets home. The other reality is that my parents don’t want to eat non-Korean food; they want to hold on to what they know. What else do they have but the taste of those familiar dishes, which my mother can, for the most part, recreate from ingredients at the nearby A&P. She’s grateful for the wide, shiny aisles of the chilled supermarket and its brightly lit inventory of canned goods and breakfast cereals and ice cream, but the cabbage is the wrong kind and the meat is oddly butchered and the fish has been set out on the shaved ice prefilleted, so she can’t tell how fresh it is, and she can’t make a good broth without the head and bones and skin. But she makes do; there’s always garlic, often ginger and scallions, and passable hot peppers. We still have a few cups of the ground red-pepper powder that friends brought over from Seoul, and every once in a while we can get the proper oils and fresh tofu and dried anchovies and sheets of roasted seaweed on a Sunday drive down to Chinatown.
We adore those Chinatown days. I love them especially because it means we skip church and the skeptical regard of the pastor and his wife and the bellowing Hananims and Amens from the congregation that for me are calls to slumber—a break that I see now my parents welcome too. Somewhere on Bayard or Mott Street, we’ll have a lunch of soup noodles or dim sum and do the shopping with an eye on the time, because the parking lot is expensive and by the hour, and, despite the parade-level litter and the grimy bins of dying eels and carp and the lacquer of black crud on the sidewalks, which she would never otherwise tolerate, my mother seems calmed by the Asian faces and the hawker carts of fried pot stickers and gooey rice cakes and the cans of stewed mackerel and chiles filling the shelves. She’ll go unexpectedly slowly through the crammed aisles of the dry-goods store, lingering over selections that aren’t exactly what she’s looking for but that nonetheless speak to her in a voice I imagine sounds very much like her own: Take your time, silly girl. Enjoy yourself. You’re not going anywhere. Soon enough, the bags of groceries are teetering like drowsy siblings between my sister and me in the back seat of our navy-blue Beetle as we swerve up the FDR Drive. The seats are covered in a light-gray leatherette stippled like the back of a lizard, which I’m constantly picking at with my fingernail, inevitably running over with my tongue. It tastes of erasers and throw-up. My father is one of those people who drive by toggling on and off the gas pedal, lurching us forward for brief stretches and then coasting, the rattling of the fifty-three-horsepower engine establishing the dread prophetic beat, my sister and I know, of our roadside retching—one of us, and sometimes both, barely stumbling out of the car in time to splash the parkway asphalt, stucco the nettles. Now, with the odor of dried squid and spring onions and raw pork enveloping us, we’d be doomed, but luckily we don’t have too far to go to get back to New Rochelle; my father will let us out before searching for a parking spot, my sister and I sprinting for the playground while my mother goes upstairs to empty the bags.
On those post-Chinatown evenings, she’ll set out a plate of fluke or snapper sashimi to start (if she finds any fresh enough), which she serves with gochu-jang sauce, then broiled spareribs and scallion fritters and a spicy cod-head stew along with the banchan of vegetables and kimchi, and it’s all so perfect-looking, so gorgeous, that we let out that whimpering, joyous, half-grieving sigh of people long marooned. Yet often enough, apparently, the dishes don’t taste exactly the way they should. My father, the least imperious of men, might murmur the smallest something about the spicing of a dish, its somewhat unusual flavorings, and my mother will bitterly concur, lamenting the type of fermented bean paste she has to use, the stringy quality of the meat, how these Chinatown radishes have no flavor, no crunch, instantly grinding down her lovely efforts to a wan, forgettable dust. We protest in earnest, but it’s no use; she’s not seeking compliments or succor. She can get frantic; she’s a natural perfectionist and worrier made over, by this life in a strange country, into someone too easily distraught. In Korea, she’s a forthright, talented, beautiful woman, but here, at least outside this apartment, she is a woman who appears even slighter than she already is, a woman who smiles quickly but never widely, a foreigner whose English comes out self-throttled, barely voiced, who is listening to herself to the point of a whisper.
Never quite up to her own exalted standards, she is often frustrated, dark-thinking, on edge. Periodically I’ll catch her gripped in fury at herself for not quite comprehending, say, the instructions on a box of Rice-A-Roni or Hamburger Helper (seemingly magical dinners that my sister and I whine for, despite not actually liking the stuff), revealed in her wringing the packet like a towel until it’s about to burst, then remorsefully opening it and smoothing it out and trying to decipher the back of the box again. I do something similar with toys that I can’t get to work properly, or am tiring of, or sometimes—and with an unequaled, almost electric pleasure—the ones I value most. I’ll take the claw end of a hammer and pry open the roof of a Hot Wheels car, the enamel paint flaking off from the twisting force and gilding my fingertips. I’ll squeeze the clear plastic canopy of the model P-51 Mustang I’ve carefully assembled until it collapses, the head of the tiny half-pilot inside shearing off. We are mother and son in this way—we share a compulsion we don’t admire in the other but never call out either, and right up to the unsparingly frigid night she dies, nineteen years later, and even now, another nineteen on, I’ll prickle with that heat in my foolish, foolish hands.
A few years earlier, when we briefly lived in Manhattan—this before I can articulate my feelings for her, before I understand how completely and perfectly I can hurt her—I make her cry because of a fried egg. She cooks an egg fo
r me each morning without fail. I might also have with it fried Spam or cereal or a slice of American cheese, which I’ll unwrap myself and fold over into sixteen roughedged pieces, but always there is a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime, laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It’ll corrupt you for all time. But one morning I’m finally sick of it, I’ve had enough. She never makes an exception, because it’s for my health—everything is for my health, for the good of my bones, my brain, for my daunting, uncertain future—but rather than eat yet another, I steal into her bedroom with my plate while she’s talking on the telephone with Mrs. Suh (at that time her only friend in the country) and drop it onto her best shoes, black patent-leather pumps. And here’s the rub: there is no sound a fried egg makes. It lands with exquisite silence. This is the dish I’ve been longing to prepare.
Do I confess what I’ve done? Does my face betray the crime? All I remember is how my mother, still holding the phone, and my baby sister, usually squirming in her high chair, both pause and stare at me as I return to the kitchen table. My mother bids Mrs. Suh good-bye and stands over me, eyeing my plate swiped clean save for the glistening oil. Without a word from either of us, I’m dragged forth, her hand gripping my elbow, and we’re inexplicably moving. It’s as if a homing beacon only she can hear were madly pinging from her bedroom, where I’ve left the sliding closet door open for all to see my work: the yolk broken and oozing inside the well of one shoe, the rubbery white flopped over the shiny ebony toe. It’s a jarring, bizarrely artful mess; boxed in Lucite, it could be titled “Stepping Out, 4,” or “Mother’s Day Fugue,” but of course she can’t see it that way because she’s hollering, her morning robe falling open because she’s shaking so violently, stamping her foot. The end of the robe’s belt is bunched in her tensed fist, and I think, She may kill me, actually kill me. Or my father will do the job when he gets home. But I’m hugging her leg now, my face pressed against her hip, and as much as I’m afraid for myself, I’m confused too, and frightened for her, for tears are distorting her eyes, and she’s saying, in a voice that I will hear always for its quaver of defiance and forfeit, how difficult everything is, how wrong and difficult.
She’s too indulgent of us, especially of me. I love to eat, so it’s easy for her, though also at times a burden for us both. Each morning at breakfast, after the egg, she asks me what I want for dinner, and except when my father requests Japanese-style curry rice, which I despise (though I enjoy it now) and show my disgust for by dragging my chair into the kitchen and closing the louvered doors to “get away” from the smell, my choice is what we’ll have. As with an emperor, my whims become real. Dinners-from-a-box aside, I have wide-ranging tastes, but increasingly it’s American food I want, dishes I encounter while eating at friends’ apartments, at summer camp, even in the cafeteria at school: meat loaf (with a boiled egg in the middle), southern fried chicken and mashed potatoes, beef Stroganoff over egg noodles, lasagna. These dishes are much heavier and plainer than ours, but more thrilling to me and my sister and perhaps even to my parents, for it is food without association, unlinked to any past; it’s food that fixes us to this moment only, to this place we hardly know.
My mother, having no idea how the dishes should taste, at first struggles to prepare them, going solely by recipes that she copies into a small notebook from a new friend in the building, Mrs. Churchill, an always smiling, blond-haired, broad-shouldered woman who hails from Vermont and has a shelf of classic cookbooks. It’s excruciatingly slow going at the A&P as my mother runs down her shopping list—it’s as if she were at the library searching for a book in the stacks, trying to find the particular spices and herbs, the right kind of macaroni, the right kind of cheese or cream (heavy or sour or cream or cottage cheese and a perhaps related cheese called ricotta and the deeply puzzling cheese that is Parmesan, which comes in a shaker, and is unrefrigerated), the right canned tomatoes (chopped or crushed or puréed—what, exactly, is “puréed”?), each decision another chance to mar the dish beyond my ignorant recognition. I can be tyrannical, if I wish. I can squash her whole day’s work with a grimace, or some blithe utterance: It’s fatty. It’s too peppery. It doesn’t taste the same. You can watch her face ice over. Shatter. Naturally, she can’t counter me, and this makes her furious, but soon enough she’s simply miserable, her pretty eyes gone lightless and faraway, which is when I relent and tell her it’s still good, because of course it is, which I demonstrate by shoving the food in as fast as I can, stuffing my awful mouth.
Her lasagna is our favorite of that suite, though to taste it now I fear it might disappoint me, for the factory sauce (which I demand she use, this after noticing jars of Ragú at both the Goldfusses’ and the Stanleys’) and the rubbery, part-skim mozzarella, the cut-rate store-brand pasta, the dried herbs. But back then, it’s a revelation. Our usual dinners feature salty fish and ginger, garlic and hot pepper; they are delicious in part because you can surgically pick at the table, choose the exact flavor you want. But this is a detonation of a meal: creamy, cheesy, the red sauce contrastingly tangy and a little sweet, the oozing, volcanic layer cake of the pasta a thrilling, messy bed. Maybe I first have it at Ronnie Prunesti’s house, or Mrs. Churchill delivers a show model, but all of us are crazy for it once my mother begins to make it. We choose our recipe (was it on the box of macaroni?), our tools. I remember how she carefully picked out a large Pyrex casserole dish at Korvette’s for the job, a new plastic spatula, two checkerboard wooden trivets, so we can place it in the center of the table, and for a few years it becomes a Friday evening tradition for us. She makes it in the afternoon after dropping me off in town for my junior bowling league, and when she and my sister pick me up I hardly care to recount my form or my scores (I’m quite good for a second-grader, good enough that my father decides that I should have my own ball, which is, whether intentionally or erroneously, inscribed “Ray”) owing to the wonderful smell on their clothes, clinging to my mother’s thick hair—that baked, garlicky aroma, like a pizzeria’s but denser because of the ground beef and the hot Italian sausages she has fried, the herbal lilt of fennel seeds.
My father gets home early on Fridays, and while he takes off his tie and washes up for dinner my sister and I set the table with forks and knives (but without chopsticks, since I insist that there be no side of rice and kimchi at this meal, as there is at every other), folding the paper napkins into triangles. My mother brings out a bowl of iceberg-and-tomato-and-carrot salad, a dish of garlic bread, my sister waiting for the Good Seasons Italian dressing to separate so she can start shaking it again. I wonder aloud if my father ought to retrieve from the top of the kitchen cabinet the clay-colored ceramic bottle of Lancers they got as a present (they rarely drink), if only because it makes the table look right. They do, although the wine is old, for they forget that they opened it a month before, when a classmate came through New York. But no matter. They don’t know that the wine has soured. My mother will lift out fat squares of the casserole, the fine strings of cheese banding across the table; I scissor them with my fingers and flinch at the tiny-striped burn. We feast. Only my sister can eat just one. Who cares that it’s too rich for us to handle, who cares that our family affliction of mild lactose intolerance will surely lead to guffaws and antic hand-fanning during the Friday night repeat of the Million Dollar Movie. Here is the meal we’ve been working toward, yearning for. Here is the unlikely shape of our life together—this ruddy pie, what we have today and forever.
This is what a boy thinks, a boy with a tongue for a brain, a heart.
Now my mother is nearly done baking the turkey. Bake she must, because there’s no Roast setting on the oven. It reads “Roast” in Mrs. Churchill’s beautifully handwritten instructions, and the Churchills have gone away for the holiday. There’s no one else we can call—at least, no one who would know. It c
ertainly smells good, as if we were going to have a soup of pure fat. Yet my mother desperately peers in at the bird, the tendrils of her hair stuck against her temples, biting her lower lip, as she does whenever she’s frustrated or unsure of herself. She has been basting it with margarine and the pan juices, but I can see she’s deeply worried, for the bird was still slightly frozen when my father shoved it in, and we’ve been baking instead of roasting and we have no meat thermometer (“Why didn’t I buy one!”), and at some point amid the continuous conversation with my uncle and aunt we’ve lost exact track of the time.
My mother has readied other food, of course, if none of the traditional accompaniments. We’ll have the bird and its giblet stuffing à la Churchill (a recipe I still make), but the rest of the table is laid with Korean food, and skewed fancy besides, featuring the sort of dishes reserved for New Year celebrations: gu jeol pan, a nine-compartment tray of savory fillings from which delicate little crepes are made; a jellyfish-and-seaweed salad; long-simmered sweet short ribs; fried hot peppers stuffed with beef; and one of my favorites, thin slices of raw giant clam, whose bottom-of-the-sea essence almost makes me gag, but doesn’t quite, and is thus bracing, galvanic, a rushing of the waters. Yet because of what’s happening in the kitchen, we’re not paying much attention; we’re distracted by our celebrity guest, so buxom and tanned. My mother decides it’s time; a piece of plastic has popped up from the breast, though exactly when she’s not sure. My father helps her pull the turkey out and they lift it from the pan, cradling it with butcher string, onto the platter. We quickly take our places. Do we remove the stuffing now or serve it directly from the bird? The instructions don’t say. After some discussion, it’s decided that it should be left in—the bird might look too empty, sad. My father wields the new carving knife he’s bought, a long, scary blade with a saw-toothed edge on one side and smaller serrations on the other. My mother winces. The knife strobes: the first cut is deep, surprisingly easy.
The Best American Essays 2011 Page 17