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.
I scanned the range of destruction in a long panorama. From the kitchen, where, incongruously, the pattern of quiet tulips glowed subtly across the wallpaper, a thin column of light passed over the threshold into the dining room, and everything was illuminated. The smashed Corelle plates, the bright red juices of the Korean food bleeding into the downy white of the carpet like a thousand small wounds, the chair overturned on its side, looking dead and given up. From this spot on the floor, I thought about the world—how you are supposed to build things, not tear them down, and how when one person breaks something, a different person might stay to clean it up. Whom do you help but the person who stays to clean up?
I turned around and saw Umma sitting on the floor against the wall. She wept, holding her head in her beautiful hands. I moved toward her, placing my body next to hers, laying my hand over hers. Embrace her, I thought. Cling to her, I thought. From inside the prison of her existence, she looked far away into the nothingness now. From across this distance, I called to her, “Umma?” and willed her to hear me. I am magic; I have all the power in the universe inside of me, and I am magic, I told myself.
And my mother, the tired and ancient Sibyl in a cage, said, “I want to die.”
I sobbed harder then, hearing her reply, and I shook her hand with my hand, saying, “No.” This woman had taught me that love was an obedience, and the guilt inside of me pricked hard that I had wanted to run away and leave her behind. In the half-shorn cane fields of Sugar Land, there was a house, a new house built from dreams, inside there were broken people, and dreams were not being built but being torn down. I bowed under the immense darkness of my mother’s psyche.
“Hyeseung-a, don’t be like me when you grow up,” she said.
What would be so bad about being like her one day? What would be so bad about being kind and generous in the face of lack, and clever in everything? But I knew what she meant. Where was the key to her prison? I wanted to scream at the universe. Had I had it but lost it? If so, I must have been bad. I hugged my mother to my body and through my skin leached the sadness out from hers, and ate and ate and ate her sadness away with my life.
We sat like that for some time. She said more things children should not hear about their fathers from their mothers. Appa not being as smart or accomplished as she. Appa, who dreamed of being a successful businessman but lacked the emotional aptitude and savviness to maneuver even normal life. I heard and saw everything, as immigrant children are not shielded from much; in some cases, they are the shield themselves. I submitted and let myself be that shield, for Umma was intensely private with outsiders. I was her best friend and confidante. She had no one else in America, and it never occurred to me that the natural boundaries between parent and child were being encroached.
3.
BEFORE UMMA MOVED BY HERSELF to Seoul to attend a prestigious all-girls middle school, she lived a peripatetic childhood in the countryside in that dark postwar period when nearly all were hungry and very poor. With her older brother away at school, her life was female and rhythmic with her widowed mother’s. Back then, a life as a respectable working woman was a scrounging, and my grandmother sewed to survive. The two were always moving, Umma said, and lived under the protection of one male relative or another. A rich uncle—an otherwise gruff, withholding man—took my young mother aside one day, the barn animals moaning woefully in the distance, and told her, “You are brighter than anyone. There’s nothing for you in the village.” She moved to the capital where she boarded with rich families as a live-in tutor, teaching children not much younger than she and studying in the weak light of the lamp after her charges were down for the night. Umma liked to sing, and in some faraway dream that seemed only loosely to belong to her, she wanted to be an artist. Only sons and daughters of the wealthy could afford to study art, she knew, so she set aside this out-of-reach life and went on to the nursing school at Seoul National University.
According to her, my father had been the poorest of many suitors, scions of privileged families who, after graduation, had gone to work at the chaebols. She met Appa in a soft-focus Korean melodrama that played to their sensitive natures: Umma, a young nurse, was tending Appa’s dying friend when he walked in one day during visiting hours. This friend had been as penniless as he was sick, and Appa, penniless himself, found the money to pay for the operation. The friend ended up dying, but before, had made Appa promise to look after his father, which Appa did by making visits and giving the old man money. The romance of it all—the dying friend, the many instances of poverty, the deathbed wish—was too much for my mother, and that is how she came to the conclusion that her poorest suitor had the biggest heart.
After the honeymoon, my parents moved into an apartment north of the Han River. Appa got a plum job at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, or KIST. He soon came to hate it, as he was the only scientist who wasn’t a Seoul National University, or SNU, graduate. His engineering degree was from Hanyang University, the Korean equivalent of MIT or Caltech, but his SNU coworkers looked down on him anyway. In those days, and perhaps still now, that was Korea—it’s the gold standard or you’ve failed.
When I was born the next summer, my paternal grandfather, upon learning his newborn grandchild was not a boy, refused to name me. Not flinching, Appa sought out the capital’s most exclusive jangmyeongso, or name-giver, and paid what was then about a thousand dollars to have my star chart made. Despite being born in the Year of the Horse, considered inauspicious for girls, I was to do great things according to the name-giver, who undoubtedly made similar pronouncements to all his clients. Regardless, Appa completely doted on me. Every evening, he stopped by the baekwajeom’s food emporium, where bananas were imported for the first time and cost a thousand won, or about one US dollar, and brought home one long yellow fruit. Pulling back the peel, Umma mashed the sweet innards and fed them to me with a silver spoon that just fit my mouth.
One day, Appa got fed up with KIST and said we’re going to America, where money talks and no one cares what school you went to. And he wasn’t going to be a millionaire—he was going to be a billionaire. Seven thousand dollars was the limit an immigrant could bring into the country in 1980 without having to declare the cash at port of entry. They managed to cobble together that amount from Umma’s earnings and white envelope tips from the hospital and Appa’s salary, which she carried as a stack of traveler’s checks in her purse on the flight from Seoul. We followed one of Appa’s brothers, who’d settled in Houston with his wife and kids. After three months at my uncle’s place, during which time Umma and her sister-in-law circled each other warily like enemy cats, my parents rented a two-bedroom apartment in Bellaire, a neighborhood of strip malls in a town of strip malls, and they bought their first car in America, a brown punch buggy. Appa worked at an engineering firm while he got his bearings, biding his time with his plans, which he turned slowly over and over in his head, like a hog on a spit over a flame.
It was in the Bellaire apartment that Umma learned from her brother in Onyang of their mother’s death. It was an international call and expensive, but a handful of minutes was all it took to tell someone a long life was over. Signing off, Umma slid down onto the carpet. The receiver was off the hook on the ground next to her, the howler tone beeping its low complaint. It had been some time of night after dinner, and when Appa was told the news, he went wordless out onto the lanai to smoke, for he and my grandmother had not gotten along. I stayed with Umma in the bedroom, and played with a wool hat that had come with us from Korea but would always be too warm for Texas. I slipped on the beanie, which had a white pom-pom sewn to the top, and half hopped, like a bunny rabbit, toward her. But when she looked up—her eyes were wet—I realized I had misread the atmosphere and that she needed me. She stretched out her arms and said, her voice gentle even through pain, “Hyeseung-a, please don’t wear this hat. Koreans do not wear white on their heads or someone will die.” Yet another Korean superstition I did not understand. After all, hadn’t someone already died? But I cast aside the beanie as if it were an offense, and folding myself into a ball, I swam into her outstretched arms. Enclosing me, she cried “Umma” over and over into my little chest.
There had been no money for Umma to return to Korea for the funeral, a fact she mentioned often in later years. She had proceeded with what she had wanted in life, to marry Appa, disregarding her mother’s warning, and it had taken mother and daughter away from each other. The message I gleaned? Following your own desires and ignoring your mother’s had consequences.
Appa heard through the Korean grapevine about a used Volvo for sale, and Volvos were from Sweden and what rich people drove. He said we were in America now and should live as if we were rich and hence, we needed to buy that Volvo. Umma protested vanity, but Appa didn’t care, declaring like a true American, “You have to spend money to make money,” and he plunked down $1,000 for it and gave away the beloved punch buggy.
The Volvo had more than a hundred thousand miles on it, but it was gorgeous, a rich burgundy color, and had leather seats. But all this luxury couldn’t keep it from bursting into flames with us in it one sultry night. When the rusted buckle of my seat belt would not unlatch, my pregnant mother, near the end of term with my brother, ripped it from its fitting in a freakish, adrenalinefueled burst of strength. Appa maneuvered the flaming car into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, bolted into the convenience store, and grabbed the coldest things from the fridge, which happened to be liters of Sprite. While the clerk screamed after him to pay, he dashed outside and sprayed the blistering engine with soda. Meanwhile, my overwrought mother, upon extricating me, clasped me to her massively pregnant body and repeated like a mantra how her precious firstborn would not die in a fiery mass in the old hubris mobile. I allowed her to clutch me atop her humongous belly, and we lay together on the sizzling asphalt of the 7-Eleven parking lot as onlookers surrounded us.
When Appa was at the office, Umma had As the World Turns or The Young and the Restless on while doing chores. If the characters’ fights were as maudlin and volatile as my parents’ in real life, Umma and I learned how to say “I love you” just as often and well. She didn’t want me to lag behind the American children when it came time for school, so she taught me the English alphabet, never the Korean. Around the apartment, she stuck index cards and named things: “Window.” “Chair.” “Curtain.” “Couch.”
I had a Fisher-Price desk in the corner where I played and did the work of being a child. When Appa came home, still smelling of starch, next to my chair he stacked reams of used dot-matrix printer paper from the office, the white backs of which I drew on. The kitchen noises receding, I sat at my drafting table away from the beating heat of the windows, and with my hand gripped around a pencil, a tight wave of concentration began to thrum within me. As I fell further into myself, the wave grew wider in oscillation and then escaped, pushed out of me—out of my hand, out of the tip of the pencil—and overtook the room. On the page, a figure emerged, and as Umma, my first drawing teacher, had shown me, I tapered the arms, measured the hips in relation to the waist, shaded crudely with the lead. The experience of drawing entirely satisfied me; in it, I found completion.
Around the time of the Volvo blaze, Umma put me in day care so she could study for the nursing boards. She had to relearn all the medical terminology—the systems, anatomy, protocol—but this time in English. I didn’t take well to day care. It was only a few hours a day, but when Umma dropped me off, I screamed as her figure diminished in the distance. The children, teachers, and staff spoke a strange language and looked, even smelled, different from Koreans. Having a soft heart, Umma would have taken me out and stopped worrying about the boards—but this was the time of Seiko watches, of the Gucci shack, and she knew she would have to be the breadwinner if Appa went on with his businesses. My parents had already started looking for houses in Sugar Land, and after Arthur was born that winter, we moved out of Houston.
As I grew older and wiser in my child way, I understood that while my mother was a strong person, it was my father whose life decisions called the shots of our own. Umma had never wished to emigrate like some girls in far-off lands who spent their adolescence flipping through American magazines and dreaming of Jordache. Appa’s promise to her—“Five years and we’ll return to Korea”—was never made good of course, and the grand theme of my childhood was watching her play the Good Wife and support him while the Life That Could Have Been slipped away. I loved my father, but I chose my mother. Over the years, her job was to accumulate things, and what she amassed she handed over to Appa, for his businesses and for his self-worth—the latter a very American concept of self to be held by a Korean male.
In our prefab notion of an American Dream House, selected from eight model homes—as though there were only so many versions of that dream—Arthur and I entertained ourselves in the lonely playground of absentee parenting. Appa was hardly a caretaker when Umma was at the hospital, and his laissez-faire fathering kept Arthur and me wild. And soon, Appa’s low voice on the phone—“aluminum fin tubes,” “scrap truck rims,” “copper tubing”—became the white noise of my childhood. Meanwhile, I forged ahead with plans of my own, putting my brother, who was my best friend, in a purple dress whereby he transformed into my more beloved sister Stephanie, who didn’t mind playing Barbies; she was just happy to be around me.
4.
APPA HAD A HARD TIME with the church, especially because mass times conflicted with running businesses. But when he opened the factory out in Katy, the town just west of Houston, in 1984, he invited Father Kowalski from the Korean Catholic Church.
Father Ko—as we called the Polish priest, Koreanizing his name—did as he was bid: he came, called me “Swan Neck,” and threw holy water on the factory’s concrete foundation, which Appa had poured by the determined strength of his own back.
In addition to this Catholic assurance of success, we also had positive feng shui: the entrance to the factory faced east—where everything begins. In the pivot of the L-shaped warehouse, the steel furnace stood, the workhorse of the venture and my father’s Minervan mind spring. When alive, it sounded interminably of fire and efficiency. In it, cans, tubes, and other industrial scrap material high in aluminum content were melted down at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit into a silvery molten syrup that was then poured into Toblerone-shaped molds. After the liquid had cooled on the rocks, the workers lashed the molds against the cement until there was a dull pop as the ingot divorced the confines of the tray like a frozen pound cake from its tin. Every day, regardless of the heat, Appa and the men wore long pants and shirts to head off sparks, toiling like a chain gang, doggedly and without shade in the always summer sun.
Appa forgot to smoke when he began the factory; no time. He worked sixteen-, seventeen-hour days, and when I left for school in the morning—I was in first grade—he was still asleep in bed. Umma quit the graveyard shift so she could be home in the evenings, with Appa returning close to dawn.
Every night he was at the factory, Umma took Appa a full Korean dinner. After the dinner Umma, Arthur, and I had eaten was cleared away, she took out the round batchim, a lacquered serving tray that had been a wedding gift. On it, she arranged small covered dishes of spinach, tofu, bean sprouts, kimchi, and oily mackerel, portions she’d put aside for Appa before giving us any. His rice bowl, which had also been filled before ours, was swaddled in a thick towel as if it were a Fabergé egg.
The three of us piled into the van that Appa had bought used off the classifieds. There were only two real seats in the van, and because I was older, I sat in its dusty hull, braced against a spare tire. My whole body tensed as the feast lay precariously on my lap. When I had been new to this, some sauce or marinade dripped onto my shorts, but I had become so accustomed to the balancing routine that I could even fall half-asleep while rotating the tray on my lap, moving the cool bowls to where the hot ones had been in a strategic dance.
The crackling sound of the van’s tires on the limestone rocks as we entered the warehouse district set me awake. Weaving toward a triangle of smoke blooming in the sky, we turned into the gates of Appa’s yard. Through the dark brush, trees, and craggy mountains of junk and scrap metal, the orange fire of the oven pulsed—strongly, then weakly, then strongly again—as if communicating in Morse code.
