Umma pulled the van next to Appa’s Ford F-250 XLT Lariat, which my parents had paid for with a $25,000 loan from the bank, a third of the price of our house in Sugar Land. The truck slept under the one tree that had escaped his annihilation, a massive magnolia, stately despite its mess of heavy branches grazing the ground. Soon, a light ticking back and forth approached low in the distance—Appa’s lantern. From the aperture of the fire, he emerged with a mask of sweat and clothes hanging heavy with perspiration, looking like a dog who had been thrown into water for the first time. He opened the Igloo in the bed of the Ford and poured the cold water that had once been ice over his hands, and then peeled off his sagging shirt, using it as a rag to wipe his face. And because these were the kinds of thoughts that lived in my mind, I said to myself, As Veronica wiped the face of Jesus on the road to Golgotha. In the half-light, I could see my father’s chest had darkened, no sign of the familiar intellectual white softness of it remaining, and he appeared an exotic impostor to our family.
The four of us sat in the truck bed under the lamp that Appa had affixed to a high branch of the magnolia and whose orb attracted a host of mosquitoes. Umma made quiet conversation as he ate with the silver chopsticks she’d wrapped in a paper towel.
“Someone’s been coming over the fence and stealing ingots,” he said to her between bites.
“How are they getting them out? They’re so heavy.”
“Under the fence somewhere. I’ll have the guys cover them tonight.” He shoved an anchovy into his mouth and swallowed, barely chewing. “I need to go to the weigh station in Beaumont tomorrow. The one here is fiddling with its scales.”
“Even if that’s true, you’re not making any profit after you pay out the workers. They make more than you do, and you buy all their meals.”
“But I’m the boss,” said Appa, for whom being the boss was everything. I was sure he’d never bothered calculating how much he made per hour; he brushed aside inconvenient facts like that as if Umma didn’t believe in him or love him. “Anyway,” he concluded, “aluminum prices will go up soon.” Appa hung his hat on the price of aluminum, which had hitherto been too low to make any difference to the bottom line. These were hard economic times, judging from the headlines in the Houston Chronicle, but even when there was extra cash, Appa just divided it among the workers.
I traced his shadow on the rocks below us. Nodding up and down, it betrayed his fatigue. Arthur and I dove off the truck bed and played under the tree, poking our heads out between the branches as if we had the beautiful long hair of mermaids. There were only a few places for us to play in the junkyard. Certainly not near the four corners of the site where in the cool darkness, thick-coiled snakes slept on their eggs. And not near the furnace, which we were afraid of after Appa had arrived home one night with his chest torn up—not from a fight with the workers but from superheated steam that had shot out of a fired heat exchanger tube after he had thrown it, like a javelin, into the bed of the truck.
After the accident, he had applied ice from the Igloo onto his left pectoral and continued working for hours, at the end of which his breath had gone completely ragged and there was no more energy to move thirty-pound ingots, only strength enough to feed the workers and drop them off at their homes. Then, he had driven slowly back to Sugar Land, clenching his jaw with every bump in the road. “Hyeseung-a, fetch the Silvadene and gauze from Umma’s bathroom,” she had called out that night while Appa lay shirtless on the living room floor.
Leaving the magnolia behind, Arthur and I sneaked round to an ice bucket and took swigs of Big Red, the sweet liquid traveling up our noses before dribbling down the front of our throats in long scarlet trails.
“What’s on your shirt?” Appa pointed when we stepped back into the reach of the lantern. “Did you have some of my Big Red?”
“No!” Arthur and I screamed with teeth covered in pink syrup.
“Appa,” I ventured, seeing his good mood. “You look like a junkyard dog!”
“Isaekki-ya!” he cursed me laughingly, and in that instant turned into himself again.
Usually, Appa would have had a smoke after dinner, but there was no time. The bowls were empty, and his breath, which never again smelled of cigarettes, flowered instead into clouds of garlic and bean paste, and it was time for the three of us to head home to Sugar Land. Appa said he had to go to McDonald’s for José, Mike, and the others. Arthur and I crawled into the van, where he would fall asleep the instant we were out of the gates of the park. Umma adjusted the pillow under the seat, her neck straining over the steering wheel. As I situated myself for the trip back, I looked out the window and beheld my father, the Vulcan in the darkness. Black and anonymous, he stood in powerful akimbo, looking toward us and then back, to his small world of fire and steel, as the van crackled away on the rocks.
5.
“WHAT’S A FORECLOSURE?” I WANTED to know. Umma had every other Tuesday and Sunday off from the hospital, but it was a Wednesday in December when I unlocked the front door with my key-on-a-string to find my parents sitting in the living room.
In 1986, my family filed for bankruptcy, and the Little House of Good Intentions that was built for us, by us, in whose modest rooms I’d enjoyed a self-indulgent childhood, was repossessed by the bank.
Even with the depressed price of aluminum and the fact that Umma only grocery-shopped once a month, I’d never had a memory of hunger. So, I was surprised when my parents told me we were moving to a two-bedroom rental near her hospital in Houston. I didn’t want to say goodbye to my friends and our house, and Umma, who was trying to maintain her optimism, claimed the new place we were moving to held great opportunities.
“Memorial is more beautiful than Sugar Land,” she said, sounding nostalgic for something that hadn’t happened yet. It was evening now, bedtime, and just the two of us. Smoothing the covers under my chin, she knelt next to my bed. “There are tall trees everywhere, and the houses are grand.”
I lay there enjoying her touch and watched my mother, who was for me the first name of beauty. Many times she’d told me how much she’d moved around in her young life, how many homes she’d lost, and now she lost yet another. She would hold it against Appa for the rest of their lives, I knew. She looked up then, and the light hit the dark coins of her pupils and set them flickering. I had no doubt the houses would be grand, but I didn’t think ours would be one of them. I intuited keenly about bankruptcy. If we were moving to a rich neighborhood, we were getting there by settling on the “wrong side of the tracks,” in an apartment.
She changed tack. “You are going to love your new school. It’s one of the best in the state, and the kids are going to be smarter than in Sugar Land.”
I was skeptical of that, too. There were plenty of smart kids at my school—kids who were quick in class, spoke up for themselves in front of adults, and held their own on the playground. Though I would never have included myself in that group, I brought home good report cards, to which I signed Umma’s name when she was too preoccupied to do it herself. Delivering on grades and awards wasn’t hard when your parents didn’t let you stay at home from school, ever.
On our last day in Sugar Land, I opened my eyes extra wide and prayed the image of our house seared into my mind. Umma, who had shown herself wistful for the future, cried for the past as we pulled out of the driveway in the car that the bank allowed us to keep in the end. When we drove out of the development, the red balloons waved at us in valediction.
PART II
AN EDUCATION
1.
AS BANKRUPTCIES OCCUR WITHOUT REGARD for anyone’s calendar, I entered my new elementary with the academic year underway. That January morning, I was still in the front office as Appa completed enrollment forms when the bell rang. When I walked into Mrs. Howards’s third grade, it was all cheerfulness and quiet industry: evidence of grade-school scholarship papering the walls, and my new classmates hard at work. The room was brighter than my old classroom in Sugar Land on account of the wide windows outside of which gleamed combed soccer fields and a track shaded by pine trees.
Mrs. Howards was warm and had thick, Farrah Fawcett hair and a symmetrical smile. She pronounced my name “Hey Soon,” twanging it up, Texan-style. I did not correct her.
“Hey Soon, come to the football table and read a little for me,” she said.
I followed her to the back of the room to a table shaped like a football. She handed me a book with large type, which surprised me because I had been reading small type for a while now. So much for this being a smart-kids’ school, I thought.
“Just start on the first page,” she prompted.
The room was silent except for the shuffling of papers, and I began in a half-whisper. “In her popular series Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry writes about the wild ponies living on Chincoteague and Assateague Islands in the Chesapeake Bay…”
Marguerite. Chincoteague. Assateague. The passage was testing recognition of the vowel combination -ue, already familiar to me from the word “league.” Easy peasy. If everyone had a fearful immigrant mother, we’d all be reading by age three.
Mrs. Howards cut me off. “That is fine, Hey Soon. You can stop there. You’ll be in the football reading group.” She led me to a desk between two girls. “I’m going to put you between Avery and Hannah.”
The girl on the left, Avery, was clad in stylish, expensive clothes. The girl on the right, Hannah, was tall and proper, wore a clean, button-down shirt, and reminded me of Ramona Quimby’s bookish older sister, Beezus.
So much happened the first morning in Mrs. Howards’s classroom. After she passed back graded work, a boy on the other side of the room threw his head down into his arms, his shoulders quaking as he sobbed. It was as though he had been wounded by a red “85” on his math quiz. He hadn’t failed or, worse, forgotten his homework, which would have indeed been shameful. None of the Sugar Land kids had ever cared much about school. When I had gotten an 85, I had received the news with the same equanimity as when I’d received a 100. I couldn’t look away, engrossed as if I had been watching an exotic animal eat itself.
When Mrs. Howards gently shook the boy and took him, hiccupping, outside into the hallway, Hannah explained to me, “Timothy makes computers in his spare time, and his dad went to MIT. A bad grade in math is a big deal for him.” I nodded as if I understood what she meant.
During Language Arts, when I couldn’t do the assignment because I hadn’t yet learned about accents at my old school, Avery, with the facility of a teacher herself, taught me the lesson.
“The first step is to divide the word into syllables. Say the word ‘homework’ in your head. The stress is on the first syllable, ‘home,’ not ‘work.’ Try another. ‘Information’ has four syllables. Which syllable has the stress on it?” I wanted to mention how there are no specially accented syllables in Korean, but I thought better of it and watched Avery neatly draw the glyph in the right place.
