Then, during poetry, while I struggled to conjure more words that rhyme with “pink” besides “sink” and “clink,” Hannah, off the top of her head, divined twenty rhyming with “blue.” She already knew how to draw a Z in cursive and used the word “jalopy” in casual conversation.
My simple rube of a brain exploded. Umma had been right—these kids were smarter. And what was more, they cared. A lot.
“Hey Soon,” Mrs. Howards gestured from the front. “Why don’t you come up and tell the class about yourself?” I rose slowly and walked up to my new teacher, who tapped me on the shoulder.
In the time it had taken Mrs. Howards to cue me, a hundred thoughts bubbled up. Should I introduce myself to the class not as “Hey Soon” but in the right way, as “Heh-seung”? Wouldn’t “Hey Soon” be easier for everyone? Should I tell everyone where I was from? And did that mean Sugar Land or Seoul?
But before I could say anything, a girl with braids and an upturned nose, Tori Mailor, threw up her hand. “Can she speak English?” she asked, addressing Mrs. Howards.
Now it wasn’t Timothy Buckner, but I, who was wounded.
I stood and said nothing, practically proving Tori Mailor’s point, until Mrs. Howards broke the silence. “Hey Soon will be joining the football reading group.”
Tori and the other students nodded with understanding. I knew Hannah and Avery were also in football and that it was the right place to be. Mrs. Howards put her hand on my shoulder again, the sign to return to my desk. Feeling inexplicably ashamed, I returned to my spot between the rich girl and the bookish girl. What kind of girl was I? I had gone up in front of everyone to be seen, had said nothing, and disappeared.
Mrs. Howards directed us to open our Social Studies textbooks, and I did as I was told. But inside, I was turning over what had happened.
Up until that moment, I had lived as an introverted and observant dreamer, shy and silent, an eight-year-old who remembered a stranger’s perfume by the feeling it evoked and not by its scent, who read a book a day and drew for hours, and whose second language had by then eclipsed her native. I had never had reason to speak when I didn’t want to, and now I had been called on to be more than a phantom, to materialize and become visible.
Of course I can speak English, Tori Mailor.
2.
I PLAYED MOST DAYS AFTER school with Hannah Kohl, who was now my best friend. She was a great best friend on account of the playroom on the second floor of her house and her three-story dollhouse furnished with the most lifelike miniature grandfather clock, lamps, and upright piano. The first time I held the girl doll, who, like Hannah, had a sister, mother, and father, and looked like her, I turned its neat form around in my hands and marveled at the voodoo version of my friend.
Her formal mother used big words even with children, and I understood that was how Hannah knew a word like “jalopy.” When we got to her house after school, Mrs. Kohl expected us to wash our hands and then meted out precisely two gingerbread cookies with our milk. If I found Umma at home when I came in from school, it meant Arthur was sick and couldn’t go to day care, or a close patient had died. But most days I used my key to open the door, and the apartment was silent until I turned on the TV. I could eat anything or nothing, and there were no rules. Being told I could only take two cookies made me feel important.
When I invited Hannah to the apartment, I got the sense Mrs. Kohl was trying not to treat me any differently than she did her daughter’s other friends just because I lived in a two-bedroom rental that reeked of kimchi instead of a big house that smelled of leisure. Hannah had never been friends with an “apartment kid” and had been more polite than usual, moving about robotically, which made me yearn to be at her house, where she was relaxed and had better toys.
It was like this after my arrival in Mrs. Howards’s class until the spring, when Avery Stern had a birthday party.
I’d never met anyone like Avery. Not only was she smart, but she was also popular, nice, and rich. She was also Jewish, a word the other Memorial parents uttered in a whisper. Her parents were plastic surgeons and it was rumored they had a second house, which they flew to. Avery had seen real snow and skied a hundred times. Too much a country bumpkin to understand the significance of these facts, I was only generally impressed, which was to say, probably not impressed enough.
We were entering the stage in our childhoods where classroom-wide invitations were no longer automatic. Kindness, once democratic, was now deployed strategically, and the social climbing among the children was something parents implicitly encouraged. I hadn’t expected an invitation since I was Avery’s new friend, but she and I liked each other from the start, and we traded books all the time. “You should be an artist,” she said on beholding my cursive manual. “Your handwriting is better than Mrs. Howards’s.”
The Saturday afternoon of her birthday party, I yanked the pulley strings of my curtains to keep out the Peeping Toms my mother was always so afraid of and changed into my party outfit: a pink collared shirt and a cotton skirt Umma had sewn. She’d come up with the pattern and wore a blue skirt that day from the same. I didn’t mind the simple A-line that went past my knees because my parents meant my clothing to be modest. In the bathroom, I hunched over the sink to brush my teeth and then pushed my hair back in a plastic headband from the drugstore.
Avery’s party was at her house, which I’d never visited, and while it was only a short drive from our apartment complex, it might have been continents. Here, there were no sidewalks, just long, deep lawns leading to silent houses. The expensive hush penetrated us, and we went mute looking for 2 Hale Way, Umma slowing the Cutlass, the ceiling fabric of which had lost its adhesiveness one winter and ballooned down, skimming the top of her head. We came to a line of cars in front of a smaller, strange-looking residence. I’d read enough magazines and books, though, to know it was unique in a fancy, modern way. While Hannah lived in a two-story pink brick box with black shutters, a tidy instantiation of a child’s drawing, Avery’s home was a low, curved structure without any windows onto the street. The azaleas and clipped boxwoods prevalent in Memorial were absent; rather, the landscape was richly ascetic and controlled, a wide band of Italian cypresses wrapping closely around the house as if in protection. Mercedes, Jaguars, and Suburbans idled in the circular drive, so we parked on the street and made our way toward the house. As I joined the phalanx of girls alighting from cars, a headiness rose within me: today was my first party in Memorial.
I waved at Avery, who stood at the door next to a slender woman who was obviously her mother. Umma introduced herself to Dr. Stern, who had the same pinched and elegant face as her daughter. Clad in black and with hair pulled tightly in a low bun, like an aging ballerina, Dr. Stern leaned forward slightly, as if the proximity would help her comprehend my mother better. Before I could say goodbye, I was pulled away by a photographer.
“Say ‘Happy birthday!’ ” he commanded, pointing his camera at Avery and me. The flash went off and blinded us.
I placed my gift, a paperback of Anne of Green Gables, on a table alongside humongous boxes professionally wrapped and decorated with bows, ribbons, and flowers. We didn’t have money for bows-in-a-bag from Walgreens, so Anne was austerely trussed, looking monkish next to the other gifts. But I knew Avery hadn’t read the book and that she would love it. I passed through the low-ceilinged living room to join Hannah and Tori in the garden.
It was a bright day when the heat didn’t make my head ache as it usually did, the sun’s rays catching the trickle of water from the fountain and throwing spectral patches of light into the air. Everyone was excited, especially Avery, who was even nicer than usual. When Dr. Stern called us in, the girls hopped up from patio chairs and passed inside to the dining room, where she’d nestled flower arrangements among a variety of sweets. Tori Mailor said to me, a tiny iced cake in her hand, “You just moved here so you don’t know, but French Bakery makes the best petits fours,” and I tasted my first petit four. Delicate sandwiches with crusts removed and cut into triangles were arranged on tiered platters, and I ate one of every kind. The birthday cake was something really special, a bûche, which Dr. Stern cut into round swirly slices. I sat with Avery, Hannah, and Tori, the girls of the football reading group, but they were also in a program called Gifted and Talented, which I was not. They left in a bus every other Wednesday for another campus where they did enrichment projects—that week they had been making kites—and I wanted to do that, too. Sensing my disappointment, Avery said, “Hyeseung, you’ll definitely get into Gifted next year. You get hundreds on all the tests, and you have the best handwriting in school.”
These are some of the nice things that happened at the party. Years later though, Umma told me she’d waited there parked on Hale Way the entire two hours of the party, engine off to save gas, and that she’d cried. Taking her hands from the steering wheel, she’d pressed them together and prayed. It turned out Avery Stern’s birthday was a dress-up tea party. What she had seen as the girls filed by was each wearing a garden dress more elaborate than the last. Pastel floral print dresses and lace, an excess of Laura Ashley. Some girls had donned sun hats with silk flowers pinned to the sides, and there had even been a fascinator or two, with everyone carrying white purses. A few had been allowed to wear low heels and lipstick. Agnes and Alexandra, the twins, had gone in with white gloves.
Umma recounted, “I read the invitation, but I hadn’t understood it. How was I supposed to know I needed to dress you up like that?” She was thinking how in Sugar Land, the kids’ birthdays had been backyard pool parties or, if the family had money, Chuck E. Cheese. “I had never seen anything like that in my life, and I was scared for you. Then you came out laughing two hours later and said, ‘That was the best party I have ever been to,’ and I had never been so relieved in my life.”
But she revealed none of this that day. When I slipped into the passenger seat, she simply said, “I’m glad you weren’t ashamed of your outfit.”
I looked over at her. There was her profile and thin, shoulder-length hair. My mother was an emotional character, but now she was silent.
As we drove the short distance home, I looked down at my hands resting on my pink skirt, which I was seeing for the first time with the eyes of education, mean with knowledge. Umma was always wanting me to be some version of herself, the same but better, executing the lessons she’d received as a twenty-year-old or a thirty-, except I was eight. That was how we came to be wearing mother-daughter versions of the same outfit, which I’d submitted to without any thought I might have a choice. The magical afterglow of the party dissipated in the car. Even the understanding I’d had of myself during the hours at Avery’s split apart, too, dispersing into the ether while I compelled my identity to return to the one I knew I should be for my mother. It had all been wrong; to have felt equal and included by the other girls had been stupid.
It was not that what my classmates had worn hadn’t registered; it was that they had not made me feel as though I had made a mistake. After all, they knew I was not like them. I was one of the only nonwhite students in a school where most of the Asians across six grades were in ESL. I was the only apartment kid in advanced math, but I was still an “apartment kid,” from the only complex in the neighborhood. Perhaps that meant my peers didn’t expect much from me, but my new friends didn’t make me feel ashamed, which was a credit to them and to the kindness of youth.
When the party was over, each girl received a goody bag and the photo we’d taken with Avery at the door, delivered to us in a frame with our name written in puffy paint. I held it in my lap as we drove out of the shaded subdivision into the full bore of the sun.
In the picture, Avery and I stand next to each other, smiling. My hands are thrust in the pockets of my home-sewn skirt, and I cock my head in the way I still do. Avery is grinning under a black lace sun hat. Her mother’s string of pearls, so long, loop three times around her neck.
3.
A COUPLE OF YEARS AFTER we moved to Memorial, Appa got a job. By then I’d heard my family called “poor” more than a few times. That was the word a girl from school used at my slumber party, the one where Umma drove my friends out of their minds by flaring her skirt in front of the television during every sexy scene of Dirty Dancing. The girl walked in the door, looked around our living room, and announced flatly, “Oh. You’re poor.” Umma was appalled, not by what she had said but that I had let it bother me. “That girl is ugly and slow, and you’re going to listen to anything she says?” Umma never thought anyone was better than she was. She’d accomplished a lot in her life, and while she hated being poor, she wasn’t afraid of it. She had grown up on barley and gruel in the countryside after the end of the Japanese occupation, and she thought this milk-fed ten-year-old American girl didn’t have a clue what poor was.
Up until then, for most of my life and the entirety of Arthur’s, Umma had been the breadwinner. But the family never got anywhere because her nursing money was also going to seed for businesses. She saved up for weeks, penny by penny, for a department store dress for me or a Nintendo game for Arthur, and then boom! She found the checking account overdrawn after it occurred to Appa that he required funds for “research and development.” Whenever he foiled her like this, she turned to me and asked, “Does it look like I have shit on my face?”—the assumption being that it was her own husband who’d put said shit on her face. During their violent confrontations in which Appa screamed that hell would freeze over before he would be put on any allowance by his wife, to which she replied he was illogical, not as smart as she, and she wished she’d never seen him, it was now my sobbing brother who stood between them. I slammed my door and, wrapping my pillow around my ears, tried to focus on the words in my book. I hated my father for screwing things up again and my mother for not being able to control him.
One morning as I was tucking into the hot breakfast Umma had made before leaving for the hospital—dwaenjangjjigae, spinach, fried croaker (no gruel)—Appa came out of his bedroom buttoning up a collared shirt.
“Who died?” I called out, throwing aside my chopsticks to pick out the fish bones with my fingers. I was serious; he only wore suits to church or funerals. When he didn’t reply, I got up and followed him into the bathroom. “Aren’t you going to the junkyard today?”
He was brushing his teeth. We brushed our teeth twice in the morning in our family, first when we got up, and second after breakfast when we ate kimchi, which tasted great but stunk to Americans.
He gargled and spat. “I’m going to work at a company now.”
“What?” I screamed at his reflection in the mirror. “Does that mean you’re not doing the factory anymore? What about the aluminum? What about being the boss?”
