It took her a moment before she looked up and saw me. For a moment we locked eyes. Her look of terror is seared into my memory. It reminds me of the famous black-and-white photograph of the naked girl in Vietnam uncontrollably crying as she ran down a street in her war-ravaged city. The same expression of shock and horror stared at me in our driveway. Mom looked like a person that I had never met before.
“Ma’am, please come out of the vehicle,” one of the police officers said to my mom. They had been trying to coax her out of the car, but she wouldn’t budge. No way was she going to unlock the doors.
I couldn’t say anything to her; I was in a state of shock. I had never seen Mom acting this way. I looked for my brother and sister but they weren’t home. I started asking the policemen what was happening, but nobody would respond to me. There was only silence, the kind of silence you hear when there is no conceivable answer. A moment when no one knows what to say and you simply feel the pity they have for you. I’m sorry but your parents need to explain this one to you. So I just wandered around the driveway in a daze, the way I imagine someone reacts when coming upon a crime scene for the first time. All the while my mom refused to leave the car, sitting inside it, not moving, weeping, and in complete anguish.
The police must have called my dad, because he eventually arrived with his lawyer. Dad was dressed for work, in a tie but no jacket because of the Arizona heat. When he appeared, Dad seemed uneasy. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one up. He usually tried to hide the fact that he was still smoking cigarettes, because it was not what good Christians did, but today he didn’t care. The eyes that always looked steady now nervously shifted back and forth. His movements seemed awkward, quick, and random, like someone trying to calm their nerves. He walked briskly by the Chevy, smoking and talking with his lawyer and not looking at Mom. It was odd—he barely even glanced at her. He didn’t act like her husband. He looked lost. Then he saw me. He didn’t say anything to me. He couldn’t look at me. It was weird how he was avoiding me, not even comforting me.
His silence only added to the nightmare that was unfolding before me.
My mom loved Dad. She loved showering him with clothes, cars, and jewelry. I had never seen them disconnected in any way. I never even saw them fight. Never heard any raised voices or slammed doors. Never even spotted any cynical or frustrated looks. So surely this couldn’t be an issue with them. But I just couldn’t understand why Mom was weeping uncontrollably and Dad was just standing there, nervously watching her unravel. Why wasn’t he doing anything? And who was this lawyer standing nearby him?
Until our City Church pastor arrived, we saw no movement from Mom. It felt comforting when Pastor Simpson arrived. In addition to his large, looming figure, he had a prominent, square jawline, a face that was proportionate to his big frame, and short, thin, wavy brown hair slicked back and parted nicely on the side. It was strange not to see him wearing the suit that we saw him in every Sunday; instead, he wore a pressed light-colored shirt and slacks. When he arrived, you could feel the authority he carried. His physical presence alone demanded respect and brought a sense of calm to everyone’s nervousness. He was a looming presence of stability. He greeted the officers, and then went directly to the Chevy Blazer.
As he looked into the vehicle, his face demonstrated great empathy and concern for Mom. He gently and compassionately spoke to Mom:
“Debbie, it’s okay. Come on out.”
Pastor Simpson knew Mom not by her Korean name, Son Chae, but as Debbie. He knew her, like most at the church did, as Gary’s friendly Korean wife.
Mom didn’t have to hear him or understand what he was saying. She could tell he cared just by looking into his sympathetic eyes.
This was the man who represented God to her and to our family. We had seen him speak hundreds of times and now were part of the group of insiders in his church. Dad and Mom were leading the college department at City Church. But oddly, Dad didn’t speak to the pastor when he arrived, nor did he give him a formal greeting, which my dad had trained us to do as kids. We were trained to look people in the eye, referring to them as “sir” or “ma’am.”
Mom opened the door slowly, then climbed out and collapsed into Pastor Simpson’s arms. Her body looked frail and weak, literally broken. She cried, her face grimacing like she’d been hit. Yet there were no outward signs of abuse. This was some type of deep, emotional trauma, a kind my sixteen-year-old self couldn’t comprehend at this moment.
With his arm around her shoulder, Pastor Simpson began to guide Mom’s limp body toward the house. As they started to pass me while I stood inside the garage, I couldn’t help speaking.
“Mom, what happened? What’s going on?”
She lifted her head up, her eyes swollen from the tears she’d been shedding.
“Your dad had an affair.”
Immediately, without thinking, I responded, “Dad would never do that!”
“I hired a detective. I know he did.”
I shook my head. Not my dad. Not the best father I knew. The man was my hero. He had valiantly lifted my mom from her poverty in Seoul and made us a home in Maryland. Then he’d led our family out of the tragedy of our house fire in Maryland and garnered the resources and resolve to transport us to Arizona for a fresh start. The dad I knew never fought with Mom; he fought for her. He was funny, and loved by all who were important to us. A leader in our new church family. He was the embodiment of the American dream to us. Our hero. This moment and how Mom and Dad were acting made no sense to me.
It’s impossible.
Dad didn’t say a word to Mom as Pastor Simpson led her up through the garage into the house. All he did was nervously take more drags of his cigarette. He never smoked publicly around us or especially in front of other church members. When the door shut, I looked at my dad, hoping he would allay my fears. I was now in a state of shock.
“Dad, Mom said you had an affair.”
He took another drag of his cigarette, looked away, and then looked back at me. It was odd seeing Dad look so nervous. He usually was very calm and confident. I could tell he, too, was overwhelmed.
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he resolutely said. “It’s not true.”
His voice sounded different, defeated. His replies were short and to the point. The empathy I had always seen growing up was no longer there. He needed consoling, too, yet there was no conversation with Pastor Simpson, whom he was friends with and had respect for. Instead, my dad spoke only with his lawyer.
For a moment, everything stopped. In the middle of all the chaos unfolding around us, with the police officers still outside by their cars and the gaping rips in the Chevy seats, I replayed the words my dad had spoken to me, yet I couldn’t appropriately process them.
I wanted to believe him. But did that mean Mom was lying? Why would she lie about something like that? She mentioned she’d hired a detective. Maybe the detective had made a mistake. Mom must have gotten some inexpensive, inexperienced young amateur detective from some ad in the free “newspaper” they dropped in our driveway every week. My parents loved each other. After everything my mom had been through in Korea, my dad would never cheat on her. I wanted to believe this so hard, I convinced myself Mom must have been mistaken or at the very least had misunderstood. Something had got lost in translation.
Dad was the foundation of our home. It had never once crossed my mind that Dad would ever betray Mom, and in betraying Mom, betray us. We knew him as a strong Christian leader modeling how to follow Jesus for us. Dad couldn’t have had an affair. He had too much to lose: Mom, us, his community, his relationships at church, and his reputation.
That night, a house usually filled with laughter was eerily quiet. Dad left us to spend the night somewhere else. Even though his crisis was with Mom, it felt like he was rejecting all of us children as well. Mom disappeared into the night, too. This would be the first of many trips to the local bars. Seeking to numb her pain, she turned to the very thing that drove her away from her father and her first partner, Chong’s birth father. There was no family meeting. No explanation with all of us together. Chong, Doug, and I were just left there alone in the uncertainty of our future. All of us retreated to our bedrooms, where we sobbed. The sound of our weeping behind closed doors still evokes a depth of emotion in me. Sudden tragedy feels like a nightmare you can’t wake up from. You don’t know if it’s real or a bad dream.
I thought my parents had the American dream locked in.
In the haven of my bedroom, I looked at the mementoes of my life. My worn baseball glove by the closet reminded me of the hours Dad had spent playing with us kids. Dad had loved us well. This was during a time when it wasn’t necessarily popular for dads to be involved in their children’s lives. Dad had endured many wayward balls as he was teaching Doug and me how to become baseball pitchers, like he had been. We’d wildly hurl the baseball and it would bounce off the ground and bruise his legs. If we threw the baseball too high when he caught for us, the ball would literally ricochet against the concrete brick behind him and then inevitably hit his head. Our throwing was so consistently bad that at some point Dad, exasperated, would say, “That’s it!” He was done. Irritated, he would quickly walk inside the house. But that only meant he was done for the day. He always felt bad for getting upset, so he would catch for us again the next day.
Dad had been injured and dinged so many times by us, yet he never quit on us. His intensive coaching was so on point that Doug and I made the Little League All Star teams.
So why are you quitting on us now?
It felt like the bedrock of our home had vanished. What remained was a human sinkhole. Nothing about the whole spectacle with Mom in the Chevy, the police cars, and the neighbors peering out the windows at our family seemed real. But when the next morning came, nothing had changed. The house was silent. Dad and Mom were noticeably not present. It was all too real.
Once Mom sobered up, she weighed her options. She pleaded with Dad to come back home. If she was in Korea, she would have literally gotten on her knees and started rubbing her hands together, begging my dad not to leave. She was willing to let go of his affair with this new woman.
However, in our Christian church community, Dad was considered someone who needed to repent. Adultery was a scarlet letter, a clear sign that you weren’t right with God. In fact, the church leadership, hearing about his affair, told me I needed to “separate from my dad, who is in sin and not repenting.” There was this idea—argued from Scripture—that if someone is living in sin and they are confronted with it and still don’t change, it’s our responsibility to separate from them with the hope they come back to God. We would separate from them, cut them off, essentially cancel them, because we loved them. The hope was these offenders would come back to God if we essentially cut them from relationship with us. It was a popular thing many Christians did, even to their children. It was called “tough love.” For some reason, even as a child, I thought this seemed odd and bogus, especially as it related to my father. How do you separate yourself from your own father? This wasn’t about boundaries but a form of punishment. But like any of the rules that I struggled with as a teenager, I reasoned that these spiritual leaders knew better than me.
We thought it was progress when he did come back. All of us were hopeful that our family was going to make it. We earnestly prayed for reconciliation. We were convinced if there was a God, He wouldn’t want our family to split up. And God certainly wouldn’t want my mom to return to her suffering. Mom had survived the Korean War, an abusive father, an alcoholic and abusive partner, extreme poverty, immigration to America, and even a fire. If anything would kill Mom, it would be her broken heart.
For a while, we all tried to return to the way things were before. From the outside, things looked the same.
