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For Umma and Appa
PART I
A MAGICAL-SOUNDING PLACE
1.
THE BILLBOARD ROSE ABOVE THE highway in a seduction, in a command: “Come Home to a Royalton Custom Home, Exit 114” emblazoned against a rendering of a redbrick house surrounded by fresh fulsome trees and astroturf. The windows in the shutters glinted with stars, indicating cleanness and newness, and it worked—the windows beckoned to me.
“That’s what crystal looks like,” I gasped from the backseat of the car, never having seen crystal. I was five.
The Cutlass veered off at Exit 114, and my excitement rose as we drove down the long, thin road to the development where a few months earlier my parents had made a down payment and ground had been broken on our custom home. That day, as it had been the Sundays previous, the slip of road was lined with anemic red balloons tied to stakes in the ground and punching up against each other in the wind. We stopped at a trailer before a line of model homes, and I leapt out.
From here into the mid-distance ran flattened fields from which grasses sprouted in brown blotches. In the background, far away, hung the quilt of the sky, a thin wash of cobalt. A jagged swath of sugarcane swayed across the land, owned by the Imperial Sugar Company, for which Sugar Land, that sweet and magical-sounding town, was named. Although this patch of Texas looked nothing like the highway billboard advertising civilization and completion, possibility required imagination, as Appa liked to say, and none of it, not even the hollow plain, felt ugly. In the landscape’s rough-hewn contours, I located hope.
My mother stepped out of the car with Arthur, who was born a year earlier and had just celebrated his dol. On his birthday, she had dressed him up in a hanbok and made a mountain of food, and objects were laid out in front of him—a pencil, a hundred-dollar bill, a piece of string. Appa prodded from the sidelines, “Choose money, big money!” But like a little Buddha from the height of his high chair, my brother selected simply and clutched at the string, and our father had to alter his tone, conceding quietly, “Long life is good, too.”
We were there to make some final selections. The lady from the custom homes company sat with us in a climate-controlled trailer, and the Poland Springs coolers behind her gurgled. Umma patted the space next to her, and I ran up to a book the size and thickness of a wedding album and paged through the samples with her hand on my shoulder. The lady’s disapproving eyes rested on me; she wasn’t used to having her customers include their children in serious deliberations, especially an Oriental. I had known that word for as long as I could remember, knew it rang in the woman’s mind now, and saw in her empty stare that she thought nothing of me and did not see me, not because I was a child but because I was that kind of child—an invisible one.
“Hyeseung-a, gongju.” Princess, Umma called me in Korean. “What do you like for the wallpaper?”
I pressed up against her body, which was still slim despite the hypothyroidism she’d developed when pregnant with me in Korea. The warm light from the lamp above spread like water down her dark hair, which she wore parted in the middle and caught behind her ears. Her refined face was made soulful by a long, straight nose and big eyes—big eyes like blinking saucers. I looked like her, too, big blinking saucers in a small, round child head set jauntily on a short neck. I blinked at the custom homes lady and her eyes, fringed with mascara, blinked back at me.
“I like the flowers, Umma,” I replied in Korean so as to wall out the blinking lady, and turned the page to a pattern of small tulips. I knew to say I liked the flowers because Umma liked flowers more than anything, and even then, I was trying to please.
“Yes, this is nice and quiet.” And Umma stroked my hair, nicely and quietly. “If the pattern is too busy, it’ll look garish and give me a headache.”
I smiled. I was happy I had said the correct answer and that the choice would be made on her side. In the arenas my mother wielded power, I meant her to have it.
Umma and I chose the color of the exterior of the house (raw umber), the carpet (low-pile in white, which would prove, unsurprisingly, defenseless against cherry Kool-Aid), the tile for the foyer and fireplace mantel (white marble), and the wallpaper (the nice and quiet tulips in the kitchen, peach dots in the master). Brand-new house, brand-new school for me, brand-new spindly oak sapling (one planted in the middle of the rectangular yard).
And a brand-new mortgage, which coincided with Appa’s decision to forgo a salaried engineering job in order to do what he believed he was meant to: heed the siren call of the American dollar. The four of us moved into our American Dream House, to which in no time we added the scratches and stains, the wear and tear, of ordinary life. In this small, middle-class development comprised of cookie-cutter homes of sufficient but not substantial differentiation where the cane was being tamed, our house may have fit alongside the others, but life inside was sustaining dramatic changes. My parents needed money, so one day, Umma started a job as a nurse at a hospital an hour away in Houston, taking the weekend and evening shifts, which paid better. In her stead, Appa was at home constantly, ostensibly taking care of Arthur and me, but mainly working on how to get us Big Money.
By the time I left for school in the morning, Appa was already sitting on the floor of the den in an undershirt and khakis, tapping the ashes of his cigarette into an empty Cup O’ Noodles bowl. In front of him, the Yellow Pages was open to the entry SCRAP METAL.
There was neither desk nor chair in the den, which was naked except for a calendar from St. Andrew Kim Korean Catholic Church pinned to the wall. Surrounded by pads of paper, crumpled-up napkins, Houston Chronicles, and business magazines, all annotated by his decisive hand, Appa was a man possessed. Stepping over How to Make a Thousand Dollars a Day from Home, Be a Millionaire Tomorrow!, and Don’t Be Left Behind: 10 Foolproof Ways to Get Rich Quick, I laid a quiet peck on his cheek as he made another sales call. “Don’t beg,” I whispered in Korean in his free ear—a quiet kiss and an admonition.
My short advice to him was informed by long experience. For even before Arthur was born and before Sugar Land, when my parents and I were fresh immigrants and Appa still wore a suit every day to a “real job” at a chemical engineering firm, he was always opening “import-export ventures,” selling Seiko watches, lingerie, very breathable Korean underwear, one hundred percent cotton socks with bizarre phrasing like “I am the Fun” stitched around the ankles, fourteen-karat gold jewelry he purchased in Houston’s wholesale district, wooden giraffes, cigar cases lined with red felt, and wrought iron railing.
In one of his earliest ventures, Appa peddled fake Guccis from an unpaved two-lane farm-to-market road. Our shop was nothing more than a dirt-floor wooden shack among a dozen others, eight feet wide at the front, twenty feet long at the back. Not as infrequent as our customers were the trucks whizzing by, conjuring plumes of southeast Texas dust, which, as they settled, deposited a thin layer of silt on our moist skin and earnest goods.
He often broke down in the middle of negotiations and sold to customers at a loss, having found something to justify his leniency—the sweaty roll of dollar bills the buyer pulled embarrassingly from his pocket or the child with the dirty face whose hand he held. For my father, if you looked, the signs the world gave you inspiring kindness were limitless.
But Umma, who wanted more than anything for Appa to magically turn into a stable provider, reminded him that his responsibility was to be kind to his family first.
“You’re giving this stuff away. Every time you hand someone a discount like that, it’s money out of our own pockets,” she said as a woman went off with a Velcro “Louis Vuitton” wallet at cost. “She’ll be back next week with her friends and demand the same price!”
He told her that was enough already and to shut up, and she went quiet with the effort of contracting her anger. Appa was feeling high; it wasn’t even lunch and he’d already made three sales.
He whipped around and caught my eye. He’d just had a great idea. “Who wants Granny’s Chicken?” he announced extravagantly, confusing “Kitchen” with “Chicken,” a reasonable mistake given that Granny’s Kitchen across the road was an ersatz copy of the Colonel’s.
I jumped off the bench where I’d been trying to stay as small and motionless as possible in the heat. “Yay!” I screamed, running to Appa. I looked at him through my boundless happiness: his face was tan and healthy above the white Lacoste. Because we rarely ate out, restaurant food was the height of joy and the depths of wantonness all at once, and I clasped his knees.
But my enthusiasm was immediately tempered by Umma, who cut in, “Appa, I made gimbap this morning. It’s in the Igloo.” I remembered her at the breakfast table that morning rolling rice and seaweed while I was watching cartoons, and I stopped jumping.
He was already counting out the cash though. “Don’t act so poor, gasina,” he cursed. “It’s good to eat something hot.”
He went out to the road and, looking both ways, dashed through honking Chevys to Granny’s Kitchen on the other side. A few minutes later he appeared, running toward us with a bucket of chicken under his arm.
The three of us ate the fried chicken while sitting cross-legged on the pinewood table Appa had built. We took turns drinking from the one large Coke, the straw slimy with the grease of three mouths. Everyone was quiet for a moment, and the food brought us together.
But then, once the chicken bones had been collected and the trash thrown out, the mood between my parents shifted again. Appa went to smoke a cigarette and await his next customer while Umma busied herself with something, always busying. The general atmosphere in the shack was then both desultory and electric, like the energetic moment before the first crack in a summer lightning storm. From my vantage point on the table, I observed my father lifting the burning cig up to his mouth, my mother swatting the dust off the rainbow array of goods. What was he thinking? What was she thinking? His arm moved up and down, her hand blew back and forth. Contentment was all I wanted for them both, and if Appa was right and Big Money was the answer, then Big Money was what we must get. Closing my eyes then, I asked God please to make it so, and I clutched my hands together almost brutally, as if the force would propel my prayer into the stratosphere and under his nose.
While I prayed like that, a fly came and buzzed in my ear. It made itself so insistent I imagined it was God transmogrified into this lowly insect who was trying to tell me something, trying to tell me the answer of my family. If I were quiet, no, if I were good, then I would be able to hear him and understand. It was like that for a while, my trying to decipher the mind of this visiting deity with little success. Eventually, he tired of me and flew away. And then, a new voice from the front of the shack—a customer’s—drifted over, and I heard Umma move toward the display. Opening one eye, I saw the man had brought his family. Maybe he would buy multiple things, a handbag, some backpacks, and my parents would be happy.
2.
“DO IT. HIT MY FACE,” Umma breathed.
Her teeth were bared, her long incisors glinting in the weak light of the chandelier. Appa’s hand was pulled up behind his ear to strike her, and they stood like this in the middle of the trashed dining room in our new home in Sugar Land, their separate wills matched equally and terribly. The dinner she had made was strewn over the table and on the floor, the plates toppled over pell-mell. When my father threatened to knock the complaining out of my mother, I had stood between them and pushed against his legs.
In Korean culture, a woman’s face must be perfect. A face is a calling card, with one’s scars and imperfections the physiognomic map of a life.
It was Appa who had told me this, and yet he threatened.
“Ssangnyeon-a, I don’t want to hear your fucking nagging anymore,” he barked, but he lowered his hand. I flinched hearing him use that word: ssangnyeon, whore. My father, who was so handsome and used such ugly words. I choked on my sobs, crying the way a child cries because I was a child.
He was walking away, but Umma couldn’t help herself. “I wish I had never met you,” she spat at his back. “You ruined my life.”
I raised my face toward hers. Through the watery scrim of my tears, I saw the flint of anger catch life in her eyes. A seven-year-old child no higher than my father’s waist had been the only thing keeping the two of them from destroying each other—a seven-year-old and the trace remembrance of their decency. I was spent from trying to protect my mother, and now she wanted the last word.
“Do you want me to kill you, crazy bitch?” But Appa turned away and was done now. Snatching the car keys off the ledge in the foyer, he left, slamming the front door. No cry, thank God, from my parents’ room, where Arthur slept. A second later, Appa ripped out of the driveway in the Olds. I knew he’d just circle the neighborhood and stop somewhere to smoke before coming back, so I tried not to worry about him. As always, it was Umma who needed my help.
I looked around at the ruins of the dining room and felt life was hopeless. During their disputations when I learned more words in Korean for hatred than for love, the disorder of my parents’ lives made me want to run away. At night, in the quiet of my bedroom, as the restless crickets slid their wings against each other in the cane fields outside, making a sound like the start of a fire, I made plans—what books I would take, what clothes, how much money, and what food, and I thought about how I would disappear into the sugar for my own sake. What was the point of living here and trying hard for nothing? Some of my classmates’ parents were divorced so I believed I knew something about it. I held on to the hope that my parents would separate. The dream was of a quiet, clean life, populated with fewer people. But inevitably, my mind played out a future scenario in which I lived with my mother and brother somewhere, perhaps in an apartment across from the grocery store, while Appa was reduced to being a pauper and having to eke out a living without Umma’s nursing salary. It was easier to run away from home, not take sides, not feel the sad pull of Mother and Father, and be alone.
That night they had been fighting about money. It was always about money, and the scene was always the same: Umma breaking off pieces of herself in an attempt to convince Appa that he was not free to do whatever he wanted, like drain bank accounts and direct money for the mortgage toward pie-in-the-sky plans. She wanted him to know that this was not his easy cash to spend willy-nilly, because husbands are bound.
But Appa? Appa wanted it all. He wanted the freedom to move singularly in the world as well as the goods afforded by having a family and not being alone. Throughout the countless reprises of the one battle Umma waged to bring him to the light, he never seemed to understand the concept of compromise, and the family secret was not that we were poor but that my father could be an ugly man.
