Common Mistakes

Notes V: Misanthropic Me

2007-03-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

What happened to me?
Aren’t I too young to be asking myself that question? I am too young and too old. Whenever I see walking, breathing representations of that elite niche of society known as the college student, I want to roll down my window and scream aloud, “What do you do?! How are you contributing to society?! You, with your sun dresses and compositions books! You, with your Inter-mural sports T-shirt and frisbee! You, with your ‘I had-to-cram-for-a-final-now-I’m-going-to-get-wasted’-intentions revealed in your careless deportment! Tell me! What is it that you do?!

The specimen, after recovering from the initial shock, may reply, “I plan on contributing to society. I’m going to be a doctor.”
Another says, “I will join the Peace Corps!” and another,
“I’m going to be a teacher in the inner-city and help close that stubborn achievement gap!”

The last may set me over the edge. I’ll take that one aside and with the intensity of that Ancient Mariner, I will tell my tale.

“I was like you once! No! not too long ago, if you’d suspect me to be older. I was pushed out into the hard light of day…(I’d be hunched over, my fingers pulling upon the strings of their college hoodies)..I have seen the figures that cast the shadows upon the cave wall…(at this point, the student may try to turn around in her beaded and embellished sandals)...I wake up when the sky is dark.. (she takes a few steps back, short steps since she cannot take strides in her miniscule jean skirt which is frayed in all the right places)…And I get ready for bed at 9:30pm!
She screams, “Oh, the horror!” and flees from me back to her dorm room, her vegan cookie study sessions, her coffeehouse flirtations and her plans to contribute to society.

Then, perhaps, I’ll get back into my car and drive on. I’ll stop at a red light and glance at the vehicle in the next lane. Maybe I will see the other side. A woman in a mid-30s drives a sensibly gasoline efficient car carrying herself and a couple of miniature passengers in the back.
A very different kind of disdain emerges from the very depths of my bowels. I’ll roll down my window once more and extend my arm, not in the accusatory manner as before, but in an almost desperate appeal, I shout,

“You! You, with your higher degrees finished and done with! (I get out of my car) You, with your sensibly gas efficient car paid off! (I open her car door) You with the horror of childbirth behind you…(the little ones laugh at me from their car seats)…You with your accumulated sky miles, your job security, your home ownership, (she unbuckles her seat belt and gets out into the middle of the street with me) …your sense of satisfaction at the end of the day! You, who have forgotten the days when you contemplated driving off the freeway just to postpone the start of another work week! (She takes off her stylish, over-sized sunglasses to look at me) You, who are constantly drawing from deep reservoirs of job experience and moments of self-actualizations!
You make me sick!!!
Tell me! How do I become you?!!
She picks me up from the elbows to lift me from my groveling position.
She doesn’t say a word. She pats me on the head and offers a long sympathetic gaze which says, “This too shall pass.”

Bah! I break free from her soft manicured hands and return to my car and peel away from the intersection.

My eyes scan the sidewalks for other segments of society to heckle, to jeer at, to express my utter frustration with, to confront and tear down, to ask the question, “What am I supposed to be doing right now?!”

I decide to go home and write before I find myself accosting some unoffending octogenarian or, perhaps, an infant.

Notes IV: Blue Monday

2007-01-28T20:01:00.000-08:00

written on my birthday

This year, my birthday has resolutely landed on a day of emotional pain and nudity for many. It is true. I heard it from a reliable source (as of late, my only source) NPR. I love NPR. "Fresh Air, Science Fridays, Morning Edition, The Writer's Almanac, The Low-Life" ...programs that supply me with tasty morsels of the world around me and the lingering self-satisfied aftertaste of knowing that I am better than others because I listen to NPR, for partaking of these progressive radio entrees. They recently ended their campaign to gain members into their elite NPR club; their ego-petting persuasion very effective, I'm sure. "You're smart. You're conscious of the world around you. You secretly want to hear your essay on 'This I Believe.' You depend upon us to bring you the news and fascinating human interest tid-bits that make you more enlightened than most of your colleagues at work."
..........I wish I were a member...but I've digressed. Blue Monday is what they call it. By the "they," I am referring to the psychatrists, doctors, sociologists, statistic charting intellectuals who are usually categorized as the collective "they". The Monday of the last full week of Janaury is, by all accounts, the most depressing day of the year. That Monday, this year, is the 22nd of January, the day of my birth in 1984 and also a holiday not frequently acknoledged, National Nudist day. I couldn't help but feel that there must be, somewhere in the world, a very melancholy nudist sitting in a lawn chair in a dim-lit breakfast nook.
My birthday, the most depressing day of the year and National Nudist Day...there's meaning in that for me, I'm know it.
The psychologists say that the long dark winter nights, credit card debts from Christmas spending and broken New Year's resolutions make January 22nd the most likely time to get the blues. As I listened to the program, I considered the checklist. I don't mind the long nights, I don't have any credit card debt and I don't believe I made any New Year's resolutions but I was, however, struck by the standard birthday melancholy which, for me, has something to do with not being where I thought I would be at this time in my life....blah blah blah...I had a a bit of a quarter-life crisis when I turned twenty....but now, NOW! I am 23! 2 decades and 3 years. What had I been doing with myself? I have lived on the earth for 2 decades plus and I had not yet accomplished any of the goals I had set out for myself when I was twenty.....ending global poverty, closing the achievement gap, paying off my student debt, buying my parents a house in Seoul and opening my own Karaoke bar....
But then..the continuous voices of KPCC began to talk of Lord Byron. He was born with a right foot that was significantly smaller than his left. He had to wear a corrective boot. He had numerous debts and a child birthed from an incestuous relationship and felt completely alienated from his home country. The day before his birthday (which is also my birthday) in his thirty-third year of life he wrote in his diary.

Through life's road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragg'd to three and thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing - except, thirty-three.

Will I say the same when I am 33?
No, actually, I don't think I will. I am a part of a crazy but noble profession. I will soon be married and I still have time to open my own Karaoke bar. Thinking about Lord Byron made me feel a little better about our birthday. So, cheers to you, Lord Byron. Today you are 219 years old and I am 23 and I am glad I am not you.

Notes III

2006-11-19T11:14:00.001-08:00

11-19-2006

“You really should write.”
Of course, I should write. I know that, but I have been so far content with delivering impromptu monologues to private audiences that are so "affected" by my insights and profound commentaries on the utter confusion of my life that I fail to see the need to commit to written word. I am so vain. I am self-centered. I do not want to be, nor do I want to complain and whine publicly and without purpose but, alas, it feels inevitable. Ibsen was right, “to write is to sit in judgment over oneself.” In order to place oneself into that position, she must first become the observer and the overseer of all the internal universe and once we have taken the pains to place ourselves in this lonely position, what other judgment could we possibly make? The deliberation is short....How quick I am to jump from the "she" to the "we." No matter, the verdict is fixed. “Guilty of the vanity that judges not only oneself but all human kind.” Is that not the point? What have writers done since the very beginning? “The proper study of mankind is Man,” said Alexander Pope. Oh poor man, hanging “between, in doubt to act or rest. In doubt to deem himself God or Beast.” We are, says, Pope, “the glory, jest and riddle of the world!” Yet, Pope ends his first rhythmic poetic epistle with the words, “Whatever is, is right.” He asserts we are “parts of a stupendous whole.”

I cannot see this "stupendous whole." I've lost the meaning-making apparatus necessary to construct any semblance of a "whole." I must turn to my influences as others do. My influences...writers are supposed to have influences. Do writers choose these? It is a matter of choice? Jung, Ibsen, the Apostle Paul, Davies, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, John Donne, George Herbert, my mother, Professor Harper, Kafka and Dr. Seuss…I cannot imagine this tea party....no, it would not be a tea party. It would have to be something involving manual labor of which kind none of the afore mentioned are expecially apt.....perhaps, Paul. I think he made tents. This assorted concert of thinkers and writers would have to build a house together. They would have to lay down the foundation, decide upon the dimensions of the walls and find a way to create entrances and exits. There would be much disagreement, not a few altercations, wasted mortar and stone and in the end, could they stand back and declare it a "stupendous whole?" More importantly, could I live in such a place? I'm afraid I could not. Whatever is, whatever it is, is not right.

Notes II

2006-11-19T11:14:00.000-08:00

10-15-2006

I call these notes because notes are comfortable. We can use our notes on the tests but no one requires us to turn them in. Notes are commentaries, the essence of what is being observed and experienced. I don’t think I can do much better than that right now. I can’t call them epistles, they are not addressed to anyone, I cannot call them prayers because I cannot make the necessary assumptions…..as in, I do not assume God hears me and I do not assume that I really want Him to listen. Assumptions of that nature require a certain degree of hope.

Of course Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune—without the words and never stops at all. But Emily does not tell us where it lies to sleep at night. Does it have a home and can we go there? Must we always wait until it flies our way? What did Emily wait for? When she chose each word in every gnomic inscrutable verse,
when she spoke to her loved one with the door slightly ajar,
when her kidneys were inflamed and her life’s work in a drawer….
what was she waiting for?

I was never good at waiting.

Notes I

2006-11-19T11:10:00.000-08:00

10-10-2006

This program was designed for note-taking, for the college student furiously copying down every word that descends from the mouth of her charming and brilliant (mostly likely male) professor. She does this, of course, because she was never taught how to effectively take notes and she is a tool.

I don’t intend on using this program for that purpose. I will take notes, but on a much more pathetic subject, namely, my current place in life. When I say, place, I mean my tortuous early twenties, newly cast out of the warm little womb of college into my first teaching position at an “under-achieving” high school in a well-known barrio of Los Angeles. And when I say torturous early twenties, I mean the painful insecurity of my daily existence.

If I were in that college seminar class and the lecture presented was “The adult life of a well-educated young woman in her first year of teaching” I would write down the following sub-heading with my own commentary in parenthesis
• Pursuing a MA while teaching her first assignment (death wish)
• Not a Spanish speaker but teaching in a 95% Latino community (under qualified)
• Engaged to a seminarian who may or may not take on the role of pastor (apparently taking a vow of poverty)
• Teaching American Literature to 11th graders and developing a Drama program with 2 classes (Why does the system hate new teachers?)
• Ambiguous Spirituality (She thought she knew God)

There’s something about taking notes that makes information more manageable. Isn’t that what we all want? To make life more “manageable”? It’s a lie. What do we ever really remember from those class notes? We learned to take them and look over them for the essay we were required to write or the test we had to take. Then, we wrote the essay and took the test and never realized that we only received one small communion-sized morsel of the loaf of knowledge. And our professors have their illustrious positions because they have become expert dissectors of information.

They dissect to manage and manage to master.

And that is what life seems to be asking of me. Dissect, manage and master all that is presented before you and maybe, just maybe, you can be happy.
That offer doesn’t seem good enough for me, but if that’s the best anyone can hope for, who am I to step up to the front of the room and like that fate-favored orphan request, “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

Honestly, I don’t want to be a master of anything. I once believed that was the point of all learning, mastery, to do something and do it well. Someone once said of Jesus, “Look, He does all things well.”
I don’t think I can meet that standard.

an excerpt from memoir 2

2006-04-06T01:23:00.000-07:00

Liar

It was my mother who first taught me to lie. I would listen to her on the phone with her sisters in Korea reporting my life to those who loved me from far away. In her words, everything I did was remarkably clever and beyond the normal capacities of other small children. Her words made me question my memory. “I remember saying that but was it really that cute?” I’d ask myself. It must have been, Mom says so. I must be that cute, enough so to inspire my mother’s adoration. This, perhaps, was one of the first things I learned about myself and it became the guiding principle of my younger years. Riotous exclamations came from the other end of the line (Koreans speak unnecessarily loud on the phone). I wondered at her. She spoke to a place far away and they laughed and cried when she talked about me. I wondered at myself.

It is the first day of second grade. Mrs. Mead, new to Beach Elementary, is introducing herself. While she speaks, her fingers bend deliberately and her hands move sharply in the space in front of her. “My son is deaf which means he cannot hear. Instead of talking aloud with his voice, he uses sign language. That’s what I’m doing right now. Do any of you know sign language?”

I was quiet and inattentive until this question was asked. Some unknown force shot my hand in the air and opened my mouth. “My brother is deaf.”

“Oh? Is he older or younger?”

Better not to lie about that too. “He’s my big brother.”

Oh, I should have said younger and I taught him sign language. Wait, Lawrence isn’t deaf.

“Oh, do you sign with your brother?”

I nod slowly, knowingly, and look her in the eye, as if with the slow movement of my head I can hypnotize her like Rikki-Tikki Tavi. All the other kids look at me as if I had just reluctantly revealed my super power.

Awestruck or frightened by the little girl who stared at her with such intensity, Mrs. Mead hesitates a moment. That’s when I knew that it had worked and that she believed me.

“Well, then you’ll be able to help me teach the rest of the class. We’ll start learning sign language next week.”

Two weeks later, we have an open house. Families come and look about the room searching for the finger-painted blobs that is their child’s fine artistry. By some unforeseen circumstance, my mother is able to come and she brings Lawrence. What is worse is that he is wearing his little league uniform. How can I explain this?

“Mrs. Mead, the little league coach is very nice and let’s the deaf boy play on the team even though he is often hit on the head from behind. In fact! That’s how he became deaf in the first place. It just happened a month ago. He was in outfield looking into the stands where his nice little sister was waving at him and cheering him on when a ball came flying toward his head. Then I jumped off the bleachers and took the hit for him…..no, wait…he needs to get hit by the ball. So, the ball hit his head and the part of the brain that let’s you hear stuff fell out and he lay sprawled out on the grass. I don’t know a lot of sign language yet, because I just started learning it because he just turned deaf. Also, the ball that hit his head made him lose his memory so he doesn’t know he’s deaf. So if he says he isn’t, it’s because he forgot that he was…is…deaf…”

Good plan. Thankfully, my brother has not yet said a word. He is looking about the room, forcefully slamming the baseball three inches into his mitt on the other hand. I can tell he feels wonderfully like a big kid. After all, he is in the 5^th grade. Due to overcrowded elementary schools in Bay County, he gets to go to Surfside, in the same building as the eight-graders. He gets to hear a talk about sex this year in school. Everyone tells him so. Mrs. Mead is on the other side of the room showcasing the potted fern whose tender care was the responsibility of the class to parents beaming with pride as if their little Tommy was solely responsible for the vivacity of this fern and would soon grow up to re-plant rainforests around the world. My mother turns to me, “Ha-young, where are all the books? There are no books in this room.” I am not listening. My brother is moving toward the tree-huggers. He is dangerously close to Mrs. Mead. My first instinct is to call him to me. The words escape my mouth, “Hey, Lawrence!” At the moment Mrs. Mead looks his way he turns to face me.

Damn

Brotherly Love

2006-04-06T01:14:00.000-07:00

It is a known truth that however old or clever or worldly wise you think you are, your big brother will maintain the capacity to dupe you. What I mean by dupe is trick, fool, hoodwink, con and all around bamboozle you.

I am clumped in the middle of the church parking lot with my high school friends, expecting the church members to drive around us. This is our side of the parking lot. Soon, we’d be piled into church vans or some mom’s mini-van and on our way to Camp, but before we leave, my brother pulls in driving his Jeep Cherokee. To say it was a Jeep Cherokee, however, would be misleading. It was more like a few dirty metal boxes put together with duct tape housing a horde of steel goblins making the most ungodly of noises. We gather around it like old rednecks to a house-fire except without the lawn chairs. He gives me a big hug and a kiss on the top of my head. I know I am smiling like an idiot but I don’t care, my brother is home. I look up at his face and it looks too serious to be my brother’s face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Jennifer, you won’t believe what happened. You can’t tell Mom and Sad.”

“What are you talking about? What did you do?”

“Why you gotta say, ‘What did you do?’ I said something happened. I get no love from you when I come home.”

“Come on, Lawrence, what happened?”

“Alright, but you can’t tell mom and dad. Alright?”

“Yea. Alright.”

“O.k.” He took a deep breath. “I got kicked out of school.”

“You’re lying.”

“Jennifer, I’m so serious. And you won’t believe why, it’s so ridiculous.”

He has me.

“Lawrence! They eventually kick you out if you never go to class!”

“Man, I go to enough class, that’s not why.”

With the utmost seriousness, I say, “Lawrence, what did you do?”

My friends begin to crowd around us with the same expression of concern on their faces. Lawrence just looks at each of us very solemnly and doesn’t respond to my question as if to say, This could happen to you, too.

“Lawrence, I’m serious. What did you do?”

“Man, you won’t even guess why they kicked me out. Guess why they kicked me out. Just guess.”

I don’t want to guess. I’m becoming anxious.

“Lawrence, why did you get kicked out of school?!”

Now he won’t even look at me. I’m imagining the worst.

“Man, I got kicked out…”

Then suddenly, he strikes a pose

“For bringing these guns to school.”

He then proceeds to kiss each of his guns, leaning in tenderly toward each bicep. My friends, mostly boys, erupt with laughter.

I pounded my little fists into his bulk as my friends laughed at me. Lawrence had this gift of creating moments like this, moments that made me everyone’s little sister. It gave my guy friends (who were also his friends) a license to laugh at me once in a while but this license came with a solemn charge to take care of me. I was complicit. I rather liked it. Of course, then again, this did complicate things when I began to date one of them in college.

“Hey, let’s go for a ride” Lawrence says to Drew with a look of open determination.

Haltingly, Drew follows Lawrence to his car.

It’s the summer of 2002 in Gainesville FL, five months before Drew and I started dating. Drew has been living with my brother for the summer and interning under him at a church where my brother is the Youth director. I am there visiting for a few days. I watch them leave only mildly curious about my brother’s serious tone.

After a couple blocks of painfully awkward silence and intermittent glares of suspicion, my brother addresses the nervous white boy in the passenger seat.

“Do you like my sister?”

“Uh…yea.”

In the ensuing pause that is equally, if not more uncomfortable than the first, Drew begins to form sentences in his mind. He must say something else. His lips take shape and a word slowly crawls up his esophagus-

“Did I say you could like my sister?”

The word that reached the back of his throat, whatever it was, has now dissolved into a cloud of confusion.

“Uh, well no…”

“I mean, you’re a good guy, like, out of the guys she knows, but I don’t know all guys. She’s too good for you. I mean she’s too good for you because she’s my sister. You know what I’m sayin.’ No one’s gonna be good enough for my sister. You know what I mean?”

After hearing the entirety of this conversation from Drew nearly a year later, I found Lawrence’s brotherly instincts rather endearing. What was not so endearing was his possessiveness of me when I came home for vacations and the guilt trip he laid on me whenever Drew and I wanted to actually go out on dates during the few short weeks we had together. Drew and I spent our 1st anniversary as a couple playing poker at my brother’s house with all his friends. I believe that in Lawrence’s mind, the biggest crime Drew committed in dating me was not that he was betraying their friendship or aiming too high, it was that Drew was attempting to change his role in our lives (my brother’s and mine.)

The thing is, Lawrence and I have a kind of routine when it comes to interacting with our friends. On any given night, Lawrence calls up the “crew” assures them that they would have a good time. “Hey! Yea, I’m in town. What are you doin? Yea? Yea? Well, we’re hanging out tonight. That’s right, baby, it’ll be good times.” Most of the time we’d just end up watching a movie or playing Trivial Pursuit at someone’s house, some of us feeling a bit coerced into the ‘good times.’ If Lawrence caught a whiff of this sentiment in the group, he would give me this “Well? Start entertaining us”-look. I’d return with a “You got these people together, Mister Fun-Man who must be loved by everyone at all times”-look. I’m not sure if Lawrence understands these looks I give him. He probably doesn’t since I usually give in, turn myself on, start an engaging conversation and make some people laugh and actually end up having a good time with only the slightly bad taste in my mouth, the taste of having been manipulated into performing. This is our routine or, at least it was then. It was us and them, family and friends; co-hosts and guests, entertainers and audience. By dating me, Drew was getting too close and peeking behind the curtain of our show. Because I returned his love, he was offering drinks not just accepting them. Worst of all, Lawrence knew I talked to him about the family.

The laws of social and familial roles have ruled Lawrence’s life in ways he may never understand. We were raised to understand our place and perform our roles accordingly in any given situation. Sometimes, I think we were born with it like all Asians are born with the blue spots on our butts. My mother gave my brother his first major role when he was 10. I was 7.

Every night around 8:30pm around the time when my parents came home, we would perform the same ceremony. They would enter the house and whatever we were doing, we were to get up and bow and say, “Welcome home, mother and father” in the honorific tense. (I remember being spanked once for lying on the couch watching Star Trek and giving them a half-hearted wave upon their homecoming. They wouldn’t have let me get away with being so “American.”) After they returned the greeting, they would go to their bathroom and wash up. They came out and asked us the same two questions. Did you do your homework? Did you practice piano? One night, my answer caused a stir.

“I did, Mom. I practiced for an hour but Lawrence didn’t practice at all.”

My mother turned to look at the accused.

“Young-un-na, did you practice piano?”

My brother looked straight into her face and responded in the affirmative. My mother turned back to her youngest child.

“Ha-young-a, your older brother says he practiced today. Your brother would not lie to my face, especially in front of his little sister. You must be mistaken.”

I was furious, steaming, boiling over in little girl rage all throughout dinner. I glared at him and the unjust tyrants I once called Mom and Dad. I ate all the food on my plate and had seconds (even injustice couldn’t kill my appetite) and stomped off to my room. Lawrence was about to move back to the living room but my mother told him to be in my parents’ bedroom in 30 minutes. My brother searched for a clue of what was to come in my father’s face. My father’s face is never one for clues.

In the bedroom, seated cross-legged on the floor, my mother waited for him. He came in and sat on his knees, as was our posture when we were to be lectured on important matters and Mom’s expression portended important matters.

“Young-un-na, you need to know and understand what I’m going to say to you. I will never question your authority in front of your little sister. I will never rebuke you in front of her or accuse you or second-guess you when Ha-young is watching and she does watch you. You are twelve now by Korean years. You are old enough to understand this. So, now, answer me honestly. Did you practice piano today?”

Soberly, her son shook his head.

“Alright. Now, what will you do?”

Later that night, my brother came to my room and told me that it was wrong of him to lie to Mom and Dad and he said he was sorry for it. I told him I was sorry for being a tattle.

It is my junior year of college. Again, I am locked in a struggle with the financial aid office. My parents’ 1040 baffles them every time. They want me to explain it to them. They want me to itemize their life and explain how they could possibly live on their deficient adjusted gross income. I don’t know how to explain to them that my parents are very much in debt, that they get up at 5am and drive to work, get back at 7 or 8, fall asleep by 9:30 and do it all over again and again for me. I don’t know how to tell them that sometimes I feel horribly selfish to be here, that sometimes I want to be sent back home and work assembly in the dry cleaning factory with my Dad. I call my brother, the other person who knows, who carries the same burden of love and sacrifice.

But it’s not the same.

“Jennifer, you need to know that we will do whatever it takes for you. Do you hear me? We will work and earn the money for you to do what you need to do in life. You belong there. We want you to be happy.”

A part of me longed for these words; the other half faltered under their weight. Wasn’t this what I wanted to hear- to be told that I would be taken care of? I had wanted it put into words. My father always meant them, but he never said them, not like that. Lawrence said them. He also said we. Who was “we?” That’s when I knew what he had become, no, not become, what he had been formed to be, what my mother had been hoping all along for my brother.

It wasn’t what I had thought. He tricked me again.

It wasn’t us and them, children and parents. Lawrence was my third parent. Growing up, he was my father but a father who could fill in the gaps, feel and maybe even say more than he should. I see now that immigrant families operate much like the businesses they run. It is necessary for each member to fulfill more than one role. There is an old Confucian expression that says, “The Boss, the Father and Teacher are one.” In that old world order, my father had done right by me. He gave what he could, but in this world, in my world, I needed more than that and my mother knew it.

John Coltrane

2006-04-03T16:42:00.001-07:00

John Coltrane

cross your heart

and hope it hears

a love supreme

like a Puritan prayer

slays in the Spirit

hold your breath

and count to ten

watch the scene

behind little eyelids

Spirit Child gonna show you

Nirvana

Jesus loves me

this I know

Prophet Trane plays it so…..

…….RIGHTLY

So…….

how come them church girls

gotta sing now

from the bell?

You know what the shortest verse in the Bible is?

Jesus wept.

Mama told me He cried fo’ his friend.

Spirit Child would weep for me

right fore he call me

Up and out

Simon says JUMP!

so I jump to touch

Trane’s robes

and I’ll SWING it

……………. til the Second Coming

Bud Powell

2006-04-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

Bud Powell

Broken Child didn’t sit on a wall

Broken Child sat ‘fore the keys

We all fell Into his FINGERFALL

And all the king’s horses

And all the king’s men

On their knees

Begging for more

Billie Holiday

2006-04-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

Billie Holiday

This child was Hungry Soul who sang to eat

Hurtin’ Soul singing to eat

She sang to eat and we ate her up

Sang to eat and they devoured her

Touched their napkins to their lips

Napkins to their lips and left no tips

Fresh Cucumber Feet

2006-03-27T23:13:00.000-08:00

They say that daughters first gain an understanding of beauty from their mothers. Some mothers may be too ugly for honest words but my mother is, in fact, the most beautiful woman in the world. I’m not one to make outlandish statements, at least not without some outlandish evidence.

There was a boy. He was a friend of my uncle, my mother’s brother, my mother’s slightly older brother. A latent suspicion dwelt in the household regarding the questionably few months between their births. The older Yi sisters knew. My mother and my uncle were the middle children between two older sisters and an often forgotten younger sister, born 3 years before my grandmother died. My mother and her one brother were the most beloved and unapologetically favored by their father. Perhaps, this is what first put the idea in my mother’s head that she was beautiful. Years later, she told me,

“Ha-Young, I always thought it was me.”

“What do you mean, Um-ma?”

“I always thought I was the one with the different mother. I didn’t find out until last year that it was your uncle. Grandfather got your uncle by another woman.”

“Why did you think it was you?”

“Your uncle and I were best loved, best taken care of. He was the only boy, it made sense for Grandfather to love him best, but me…I always thought I was different. I even look different than your aunts. Grandfather, even now, only listens to me, only asks about me.”

It was true, Grandfather adored Mom, loved her entirely.

But I’ve digressed.

There was a boy, eighteen and soon to be sent off to serve his time in the military. Every able young man in the Republic of Korea was required to serve about two years in the military. It’s about 22 months now. This mandatory hiatus often compelled Korean girls to be patient and devoted in their waiting. I presume that is what this boy hoped for in my mother, pretty sixteen-year-old Yi Hee Ock. He had spent time around the house, surveyed the Yi sisters and took careful note of one in particular. Very careful note, in fact, a whole year’s worth of notes. A few days before the boy was to be sent off to learn how to aim guns northward, my mother found a package at her door, bound in twine with a single rose centered on top. At the time of this discovery, Hee Kyung was with her. Hee Kyung is the youngest of the Yi sisters, sent away to country relatives after her mother died and then returned with dirty feet and an embarrassing country accent. The family had gone on without her, treating my mother as the cherished youngest almost forgetting that there was another child. When little Hee Kyung came back at the age of 7, my mother took pity on her and swore to always to take care of her and never leave her. Hee Kyung and Hee Ock opened the package to find a notebook, a journal, the boy’s journal. Hee Kyung, age 12, poured over the words along with her. Each page was meticulously dated and written in a scribble redolent of angst and infatuation.

I saw her today. She wore her hair up in a ribbon.

She rode her bike past me today on the way to school.

She did not leave her room when I was at the house. I wonder what she does in there.

She would never look at me as a man. Maybe, I am too close to her brother. Many boys must like her. Who am I? She is the most beautiful girl in this town.

The entries went on in this fashion and the two girls laughed. Hee Kyung laughed because her sister was laughing. My mother never told what she thought so funny about it. After reading through nearly a year’s worth of entries of this kind, the girls came upon the very last entry, which was directly addressed to Hee Ock. Written in, what could only be the most desperate state of mind, were instructions to be at a certain restaurant at a certain time if these pages had succeeded in touching her heart.

“What did you do, Um-ma?” I asked my mother.

“I went to the restaurant with your aunt. He was waiting for us. I’ve never eaten so much before. He stared at us the whole time without saying a word. He probably never saw two girls eat that much before, but it was ok, because he paid for it.”

“Then what?”

“Then we left.”

“What did you say to him?”

“We didn’t speak to him. What do you expect? We were just girls. We just ate and left. He left for the military a few days later.”

My mother never had a boyfriend before my father. There was a teacher who taught poetry in a soft voice and a student on the subway. The poetry teacher never knew that Hee Ock, the class beauty, picked him over all the other boys and the student rode the subway and missed his stop everyday just to keep talking to her. I imagine that my first boyfriend was something of a cross between the two, except white and tall and well, a bit of a redneck. So, actually, he was nothing like them at all, but he did speak softly in his southern drawl. He towered over me, a full foot taller and thin like other 14 year-olds just recovering from their growth spurts. This didn’t go unnoticed by mother.

“Ha Young, your boyfriend is so skinny.” She always said boyfriend with a mocking contempt.

“No, he just looks skinny because he’s so tall.”

“Does he ever ask you to lose weight?”

“Who?”

“Your boyfriend, Chris, does he ever tell you to lose weight?”

“Why-” I faltered. “Why would he ask me that? Why would you think…what makes you think..why would you say that?”

We stood staring at each other across a steel counter. We were cleaning and closing up the restaurant for the night. We were both tired, the feel of oil and the smell of chicken seeping into our pores. I stared at my mother with my father’s eyes. She always said I had the Yoo family stare. My eyes were like my father’s, smaller and squinty. My mother always said that the Yoo eyes were good for glaring. I glared into her Yi eyes, bigger, almond shaped with the double eyelids, the kind of eyes hundreds of Korean women go under the knife to obtain. In my most restrained voice, I repeated my question.

“Why would you ask that?”

Sensing an outburst of anger, her response was rapid and defensive.

“Don’t look at me like that. I just asked a question. Don’t you think you’d be happier if you’d lost a little weight?”

I started walking, quickly, deliberately around the front counter and toward the door. She called after me.

“You’re so pretty, Ha Young. If only you lost some weight. Don’t you want to? Hey, if you won’t let your own mother say something about it, who will?”

“You’re the only one who says anything! Chris doesn’t think I’m fat!”

“Fat? Who said anything about being fat? If you were really fat, of course, no one would say anything, it would be impolite but Ha Young, you would be so pretty if…”

“Stop it! I’m not listening to you!” I shouted as I walked out the door.

“Oh, you’re always lying in wait for me, ready to attack your own mother!”

My mother and I repeatedly had these kinds of conversations throughout my high school years. In every one of them, she would throw up her hands and say the same thing. There’s this Korean phrase (아까워). It means something like “What a waste!” It’s an expression of regret, a lament of something squandered or misused. It is a common household phrase used when good food must be thrown out. This was always her estimation of my situation. It was a waste for me to be overweight. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was I was wasting. Was my body a full carton of milk gone bad? But it was more than that for my mother. I realized over time that, to her, I was wasting potential, a precious resource to an immigrant mother. I was wasting the potential to be beautiful and she took it personally. It was her genes that gave me that potential in the first place.

I went to college and lived up to my potential in other ways. I had taken my skill with words and did well in classes. I fashioned essays and devoured books with care so not to waste the ability to express myself in English, my first language and the wall my mother could never really climb. I took every class offered on Korean language, history and culture so not to waste my familiarity with my mother’s world. And time. I did not want to waste the precious time I was given to be away from her and home. I saw the potential in this time, the potential to change, to transform myself and then make a dramatic return to my mother as a thinner, more beautiful version of myself. My mother didn’t believe in wasting time either; our phone conversations she got right to it.

“Hi, Um-ma.”

“Is it you, Ha Young?”

I always wondered why she began our conversations with this question.

“Uh, Um-ma.”

“Is this my baby, Ha-Young, my only daughter, Ha-Young?”

“Uh, Uma, it’s me.”

“How is school?”

“It’s ok, I’ve been busy.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Soon.”

“Have you lost any weight? I bet you have. Are you going to come back all grown up without your baby fat?”

“I haven’t lost any weight. I probably won’t lose 20lbs within the next two weeks before coming home for the summer. Sorry to disappoint. I’ll see you soon, Um-ma. Bye.”

“Alright, alright. Bye.”

The few weeks before going home was like the last charge in a losing battle against my weight. I would spend most of the semester in a trench with the enemy distant and unseen. But a month before homecoming, I endeavored to mount the bigger guns and make up for lost time. I ordered big bulky diet pills from online websites and made half-hearted attempts at no-carb diets. The diet pills made me dizzy and hot and I am much too Korean to give up rice entirely. I usually went home feeling like a bit of a failure.

At the end of my junior year, I was bracing myself for a different kind of battle. I was going to Seoul, Korea for six weeks. Seoul was the city of my imagination, the center for all beautiful and fashionable metropolitan Korean women. My grandmother and my uncle’s driver met me at the airport. Fifteen minutes away from the airport and my grandmother began it.

“The college girls here are so cute and well-dressed. You should see them, so fashionable, all the name-brands from the west too. I guess at your college you don’t have time to look fashionable. You must study all the time. I never see any of the college girls here studying. They are beautiful, though. We’ll go shopping.”

And I did go shopping. My aunt, my father’s sister-in-law, did not appear to have any other occupation than spending money and teaching informal cooking classes to other wealthy wives. She taught them how to prepare exotic dishes like beef stew and various kinds of casseroles. Whenever we went out to run an errand, we’d stop at her favorite shopping spots. I looked also. Smaller boutiques never carried my size. In department stores, petite young women would glance at me disapprovingly and then go searching in the back for something with enough material to cover my massiveness. These were the polite ones; some women didn’t bother looking and simply told me to try a different store. This was my first time in Korea as an adult, among so many people who, for the most part, looked like me, but shopping in those glossy department stores, surrounded by such petite ladies and even smaller mannequins with large blue eyes, I felt utterly out of place.

Then, I left the city to see my mother’s family in Inchon.

“Father, this is Ha-Young, He-Ock’s daughter come from America.”

My aunt, the eldest Yi daughter made the introduction loudly and slowly to my grandfather, my mother’s father. He must not have recognized me at first. I hardly recognized him. It had been ten years since I saw him last. He was bigger then, before the stroke. He sat-crossed-legged on the wooden floor of a small room where he spent most of his day. Although he was recovering, he still had difficulty standing up and walking around without aid.

“Hello, Grandfather. How is your health?” I asked in the honorific tense.

“Eh? Who is this now?”

My aunt repeated herself with patience. “This is Ha-Young, Hee Ock’s daughter. She’s a college student now come to visit for the summer.”

“Ha-Young? Can it be? Hee Ock’s daughter?” Then, he turned to me, his eyes searching my face for evidence of this claim. He must have found it.

“You look like your mother. You looked like your father’s side when you were younger but now I see, you take after your mother. Look at you. You look like the daughter-in-law of a rich household, beautiful, well-fed and well-taken care of.”

He took my hands.

“Look, you have your mother’s hands, soft and white. And your feet like fresh cucumber slices. Your eyes like smooth black stones by a river. Your mouth like, what do they say? Your mouth like a..a..cherry blossom, that’s it. Beautiful.”

I didn’t say anything in response. I was too full with his words. He looked back at my feet and touched them gently as if they were a baby’s. Maybe he was right. Perhaps, I had come to resemble my mother more than I had thought or perhaps, in that moment, I simply believed him.

Memoir 4: Playing Grown-up

2006-03-27T22:55:00.000-08:00

I think most adults have forgotten the sheer childhood terror of not knowing how to do things. It can be damned confusing. Children are simultaneously rebuked for their ignorance and adored for it. When a child spits her carrot juice into her sippy cup and begins to eat her sullied bib instead of the pureed pear chunks in front of her, she is given twinkling smiles reflecting the Funniest-Home-Video-downy wetness in a parent’s eye. If the same child, a few years later, tries to obtain a pitcher of lemonade from a high table by means of pulling the tablecloth beneath it, she is chastised for the yellow mess on the floor. We begin life with a sense that anything could happen in any number of ways because we don’t know otherwise. But then, sadly, we realize that the big people around us operate under the impression that there really is a spectrum of correctness to the way things are done.

I stand on the toilet so I can see what Grandfather is doing in front of the mirror. As usual, he is wearing a wool sweater-vest and a long sleeved collared shirt beneath. The shirt and vest are always stiff with sharp corners. The gray slacks are likewise unbendable and severe. I wonder if the form I know as Ha-ra-bu-ji would crumple and fall if his clothes decided to walk away without him or maybe he’d turn into a puddle on the bathroom floor (Grandfather actually being made of cool water.) This is my best theory to explain Grandfather’s appearance and softness. Sometimes, I sit in his lap and press my fingers into his middle and it is like pushing a water balloon daring it to spring a leak but really hoping it would be more like a waterfall. Grandfather’s face even looks like a halted waterfall, the skin above his eyes threatening to fall over his pupils and his chin and cheeks drooping over his jaw line as a river about to flow over a sharp precipice. I stand on the toilet waiting for something to happen. Ha-ra-bu-ji examines his runny face in the mirror above the sink. I consider putting my white hands on his brown face and holding up his eyelids so he can see. Then, Grandfather does an extraordinary thing. He puts his fingers into his mouth and takes out his teeth, all of them! They come out in two separate pieces. Then he picks up his toothbrush with his right hand and begins brushing the teeth he holds in his left hand. As he brushes his back molars, the tip of my tongue finds the grooves of my own backseat teeth. I think to myself, “That’s how you get back there.” Up to that moment I never thought of taking my teeth out of my mouth to clean them. Grandfather rinses his teeth and then drops them in a cup of water. I jump off the toilet and follow him out of the bathroom, planning to return alone. A few hours later, I had to explain to my mother why I was missing my front tooth.

For that one day in my fifth year of life, I was convinced that the correct way to brush one’s teeth was to remove them first. I believe what most persuaded me was the apparent premeditation involved in everything my grandfather did. His deliberate movements mesmerized me. This was a ritual with which he was well acquainted. It seemed to me that for Grandfather, all life was a ritual he had done many times over. I guess, at his age, this is nothing incredible. Actually, he must have done some rituals incorrectly if he had to have dentures, but at least he figured it out eventually. That’s it, when I become old, I will have the same air of intention and consciousness in all that I do. For anyone to pull this off before octogenarian status is impossible.

But there always seems to be those special few who ruin my theories.

There are some people, young people, who seem to live with a certain smoothness indicative of prior experience, who give the impression of having done everything before. It was as if, in the womb, while forming limbs, they practiced basic social interactions like introducing themselves to strangers, calling customer service people and ordering drinks at a bar. Along with these, they seem to have also gone through a number of motor skill exercises with their newly formed arms and legs such as carrying a tray or walking up and down imaginary stairs in the amniotic fluid. The result is that these people reach adulthood like swans among ducks. You look at one of these people and you can’t imagine him or her tripping over a step or laughing at an inappropriate time or farting in public.

I am not one of these people. I was born nearly 3 months premature and was apparently deprived of many necessary genes or chromosomes or whatever you call them and missed out on some training sessions in the uterus. One of these absent chromosomes must have contained the genetic code of “how to handle your liquor.” I always thought of alcohol as a very grown-up thing. I liked the way older people looked holding glasses of wine or smaller glasses of unknown brown liquids. When I was younger I played, “fancy dinner party” which always involved pouring drinks for others and accepting them with smiles and winks. So, I came upon the age of 21 with enthusiasm and hope that my body chemistry would adapt to my new, more adult inclinations.

Blindfolded with a silk scarf and wearing a little black dress, I sat with my friends in the backseat rolling toward an unknown destination to celebrate my birthday. The little black dress I found on a sale rack at the Gap for $20, not exactly Vogue but it gave me the make-believe sense of sophisticated sexiness. We parked and I was led to a well-lit open area (from what I could gather through the sheer fabric over my eyes.) My friends brought me to Victoria Gardens, which is not a garden at all. Well, you could say it was like a garden with fashionable boutiques instead of rose bushes and European-style cobblestone walkways instead of green earth. There was no English manor home to go with the garden, but there was a Borders that resembled Buckingham Palace. My celebration dinner was to be held at the California Pizza Kitchen. (To this day I have not returned to that reputable establishment.) Milli thought it absolutely necessary that we order drinks while we waited to be seated. Milli Kanani, now a graduate living in New York, is one of those special few I described earlier. In her college days, she drank red wine in Jazz clubs and talked about public policy and philosophy with her classmates and professors, which I found particularly remarkable considering I can’t bring myself to address any professor by their first name even when it is requested of me. She had a habit of remembering people’s birthdays and showed up at their dorm rooms with champagne and fancy desserts. She drove her BMW like a high school boy racing to every red light but she stopped right in front of the line with a deliberate smoothness that had something to do with the BMW but had more to do with her. I was relieved that she first addressed the bartender. He asked for my driver’s license and I gladly complied. He squinted and held my license close to his face. A sudden panic crossed my mind. It’s real, I promise. Florida driver’s licenses are pretty, so they look kinda fake but they’re really not.

“January 22^nd? Well, that’s today. You sit tight, we have something special for you,” he said and turned around. When he faced me again, a small glass of creamy cappuccino-colored liquid appeared in front of me. My hand began to move toward it but I was interrupted.

“Not so fast.” He shook a canister of whip cream and gave the drink a puffy crown of foamy whiteness. “Now, you have to put your arms behind your back and suck it up in one gulp.” I once did something similar with Jell-O in a youth group game at church. How different could this be? With my arms behind my back, I leaned forward and sucked up what seemed to me liquid fire. Apparently, I didn’t get all the spears of flames waiting for me at the bottom of the glass (not so little anymore). I picked it up and finished it off while my friends teased me for not being able to drink it all down in one gulp. I put down the glass and received the applause and cheers from the crowd at the bar with a contrived smile painted over a sensation of disgust.

Every now and then, even after the incident, my friends urge me to try a mixed drink thinking that I would like this one even if I hadn’t liked any mixed drink before it. I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon happening with my friends who don’t like coffee. They are offered every kind of frape, machiatto, caramel, vanilla mocha something or other, as if there is a perfect coffee drink out there for everyone and you just haven’t found it yet, but you can’t give up because then you’re closing the door on a lifetime of happiness and Starbucks paraphernalia.

At this point, I have to interject that I’m not wholly dismissive of mixed drinks. I’ve come to believe that every mixed drink is a potentially tasty beverage corrupted by a foul-tasting bully of a liquor. I have friends who enjoy the taste of straight tequila or vodka or soju and I don’t condemn them for the proclivities of their taste buds, but, for me, all I taste is OJ gone wrong, or coffee gone wrong, or tomato juice gone terribly wrong.

After the shot of some vile substance, Milli handed me a key lime martini, which actually had pie crust crumbs along the edge of the pretty glass. I was determined to enjoy my second drink. Milli had a glass of red wine and I watched her intently. Whenever she took a sip, I took a sip. I loved the way she held her glass. Milli has lady hands. Her fingers are long and elegant and they elegantly pressed against her rounded glass while my stubby fingers fumbled about the narrow end of my triangular glass. Then, the forces of chemistry and genetics and perhaps the cosmos, combined their efforts and attacked on two fronts. There was heat and redness. Also, I felt my heart beating. It wasn’t beating fast or abnormally but I don’t think I am supposed to actually feel it beating in my chest cavity. I kept drinking and finished my martini as Milli finished her wine. A couple of my friends called the bartender and simultaneously asked for water.

One could chart the progression of that night by tracking the color of my face. I began the night with my usual yellow-beige hue and then proceeded to a Titian red. Then, back to yellow, but a rather jaundiced kind of yellow accompanied by the overwhelming desire to take a nap. Fortunately, a couple vacated a booth to the left of me. I was on my way to the bathroom, but a detour wouldn’t hurt me. The table had not been cleared but I didn’t mind, I was just going to lie down for a bit….

“Jennifer, get up. No, Jennifer, don’t lie down. That’s not our table. Jennifer, eat this bread.”

“I don’t want bread.” I murmured from under the table with my cheek resting on the cloth napkin someone had left on the seat of the booth. My friends succeeded in pulling me out of the booth and led me to the high table our waitress ushered us to.

“I’m fine,” I said between yawns and wiping away the water forming in my eyes. “I’m just a little sleepy.” My arms were crossed making a nice pillow for my heavy head and I nodded and grunted every now and then as if I were agreeing with something in the conversation.

“What have we here? It’s your birthday and you’re missing it! Wake up!” A strange man came over and began to shake me as he said these words. I later realized that he was a host who left his little podium (Why must a host have a podium? Is he conducting a “look more important than really are in a restaurant”-course?) to come poke fun at me. I didn’t mind all that much. An idea was forming in the haze of my brain. Somewhere amidst my sleepy thoughts was the command to go to the bathroom.

I sat up in my chair and looked at my friends. They became silent and looked back at me, ready for some expected announcement.

“Hey guys, I feel….weird.”

Summer, to the right of me and always motherly in instincts, calmly looked about the table, saying, “Someone, get a cup. Get an empty cup.”

She should have asked for a salad bowl. My round body became taut like a power hose and a jet stream of water and other clear liquids shot across the two tables and then finished up on my dress and shoes. The second wave was more horrific. The churro I had earlier definitely made an encore appearance.

Boy, I feel a lot better….wait…What have I done?!

I remember the feeling of having my five closest friends wipe down my little black dress with wet paper towels in the womens bathroom of the California Pizza Kitchen while the other five cleaned the tables. I remember feeling so childish, really, like a child who needed to be cleaned up. I felt so far from adulthood and doing adult things. When kids play make believe, they don’t always play at superheros, firemen, or pop stars or other glamorous games. Sometimes, they play at cashier or teacher or they simply play “house.” But what all these make-believe games have in common is that they are grown-ups in these games, grown-ups who know how things are done and they’re good at it. That’s what makes it fun. Somewhere along the line, being grown-up became synonymous with having your shit together and making it look easy.

I came back to the newly cleaned table with my newly cleaned dress. My cardigan was soaked and resting in a plastic bag by my chair. Luckily, my black dress showed no flood stains. All my friends stared at me in tense anticipation. Would I cry? Did I want to go home? I suddenly sat up straight in my chair as I did right before the flood. Again, they turned to me expectant. I crumpled down again in my chair, my face exploding into irrepressible laughter. We all laughed hard until we were gasping for air. The waitress came to take our orders. The whole thing happened within a half an hour. I didn’t want to go home. I wasn’t done playing grown-up.

2006-03-08T00:44:00.000-08:00

Wonderland

Last night I had a dream I thought I had outgrown.

I am in a church, one of those sprawling Southern Baptist churches that resemble a fort more than a church. There is the main sanctuary and here is a hallway full of classrooms for Sunday school and choir practice. Against the wall is a long wooden bench and it is here I sit with Mrs. Martin, waiting. Waiting for what? My legs dangle off the edge and I think it odd that they don’t reach the floor. I look down to examine my feet. Black dress shoes over thick white stockings. “Why am I wearing white stockings? No one wears white stockings.”

“What did you say, dear?”

I turned to look at Mrs. Martin, her patient inquiring face.

Mrs. Martin, my piano teacher, whom I had taken lessons with for almost 10 years. I had met her when I was six and was sure she would die well before I could get any good at the piano. I had then guessed her age to be 356.

Oh, she’s staring at me. She is waiting for a response.

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

“Now, do you need to go to the bathroom?”

“No.”

“Do you want to look them over? You don’t have to, but it might help.”

I suddenly realize that I am clutching papers to my chest. I slowly draw just the very tops of the sheets away from me as if I might let something precious out. I stoop my head rather low to read the first page. I catch a glimpse of the beginning of the title, “Sonata in…”

(Have you ever noticed you don’t actually read in dreams? You just seem to know what they words say.)

My mind is searching for something. Sonata. Have I learned a sonata? I must find a piano.

“You can go into one of the practice rooms at the end of the hall.”

She’s reading my thoughts…

“You still have some time.”

Time for what?

I stand up and move toward the end of the hall. As I walk, I notice a soft rustling. Swoosh, swoosh. I look for the source of the sound and I find it. My white stockings are rubbing against my petticoat. I am wearing a petticoat with lace. As my legs move faster the swishing noises are more frequent and I am walking faster unsure of why. Then, I know. Mrs. Martin’s shadow was growing behind me, engulfing that part of the hallway in complete darkness. If her shadow is growing and stretching towards me then she must be growing, growing into something monstrous.

“Jennifer!”

I stop moving, my heart ready to burst from my chest cavity. I know Mrs. Martin is no longer there. In her place is some kind of hideous monster, a Grendal, a beast out of the book of Revelation, something beyond my imagination. I can’t turn around. I don’t need to. Her voice had followed me down the hall and I hear it whisper in my ear.

“Would you like the metronome?”

“No, thank you.”

I am so close to the practice room. I dash inside and close the door behind me. The room is small and square and the walls are padded with carpet. In the center there is a small upright and a bench. I gather my blue skirt and sit. I spread the music on the decorative wooden stand. I position my hands above the keys, my wrists high so not to break the imaginary spheres under them. Before my fingers press down, I stop. I notice something. There, just to the right and a bit under the music is a small groove, an indention in the wood. The wood is chipped and worn. It reminds me of something. My metronome.

When I was younger and my mother could spend some time at home, she sat with me as I practiced the piano, some days for two hours at time. My mother would sit next to me holding a large thick wooden chopstick, the kind that is too bulky to eat with comfortably. This was my metronome. My mother beat out the time with the chopstick, striking the same place on the piano again and again always counting…1..2..3..4..1..2..3..4…

With my music spread in front of me I try to remember the sound of my mother’s metronome. I allow my eyes to wander over the notes. Have I seen this music before? I must have, if I’m expected to play it. But I cannot hear the melody of the first movement in my head. I cannot recognize the chords. I try to sight-read the music. My hands press down on the keys. I hear a stilted attempt at the Turkish March, just the first few measures. That’s not right. I try again Bach’s Solfegetto, again only the first few notes. Three times a charm. My fingers are moving more gracefully now but then stop abruptly after a pretty chord progression. It is a romantic overly dramatic type of song. Italian, I think. Wait, I know this song. I stare at my betraying hands.

“Ha young, play that song. Play that Italian one, “Autumn Love.”

“Ap-pa (dad), I don’t know how to play that anymore. It was a long time ago.”

“You don’t have it memorized anymore? How long did you play? Almost 10 years! You don’t remember anything?”

“I can still play when I feel like it.”

“That’s it, Ha young. You see, you like it because you can do it but how many people can play piano? Many people. They are well-rounded. This country is full of people who do a little of this and do some of that. Americans say they love people who are a little good at this and are better than some at that. But the people who make money, the people Americans really want are the people who do one thing, Ha young, one thing and do it very well. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

I quickly gather up the sheets of music and leave the room. I must get out of here. Once I step out into the hallway I hear the sound of clapping, a crowd somewhere close. I look to my left and my right and then to the left again. A window appears in the left wall with a sort of fattish cat sitting in the windowsill. This wasn’t here a second ago. It looks at me and then through window indicating that I do the same. I peer through the glass and into the main sanctuary. Someone at a grand piano near the pulpit stands up, curtseys and walks down some steps to sit in one of the pews. She must have done well. The applause goes on long after she is seated. Who is that? This is my recital. Who invited her to play? Wait, this is a recital? This is a recital. This is my recital and I will soon have to play.

I can’t go out there and play this “Sonata in ….oh, Sonata in …Sonata is some rubbish key I don’t know! I’ve never seen it before in my life. This is completely unfair. I must find a way out of this church. I start running down the hallway. The hallway is so quiet with its white walls and linoleum floors and I hear my black dress shoes clip-clopping along. A sudden wind is let loose in this still and silent place and my sheet music flies from my hands. I keep running expecting them to be left behind, and not sorry of it, but no, now, they are flying about my head, like mad paper birds pecking at my ears and my face. I close my eyes afraid of paper cuts on my eyeballs. Now, I am running blindly. I feel myself burst through double doors and the sheet music, as if tired by their frantic flight, gather themselves neatly into my arms. I am in the sanctuary and everyone is looking at me. Mrs. Martin is suddenly behind me, her wrinkled lips practically touching the back of my head.

“Right, my girl. Now, up you go. Good luck and try not speed up in the second movement.”

She pushes me forward down the middle aisle. A few feet ahead my mother steps out of a pew to kneel and take a picture of me. She waves and points to where she is sitting in a motherly, “I’m right here, good luck” kind of way. The piano at the front of the sanctuary seems miles away. As I get closer to the piano, everything behind me becomes darker. Here I am now, at the smooth black grand piano and the audience is in complete darkness. From somewhere above someone had turned on a spotlight and the light falls heavily upon me. Why does this church have a spotlight? Well, if the spotlight is on me, then I shall say something.

“Excuse me, I’m very sorry, you came today. I know you expected something here. I am not prepared to play this song. Please go home, now.”

No one is moving. Why is it so quiet?

“There’s nothing for you to hear or see here. There is nothing exceptional or extraordinary about me. Please, go home.”

“Off with her head!”

Suddenly, the Queen of Hearts emerges brandishing a sword.

This is when I woke up.

2006-01-16T22:35:00.000-08:00

Letter of Recommendation

I will eventually be forced out of the graduation birth canal into the cold, cold handshake of an interviewer with my eyelids tightly shut against the flickering fluorescent light of the real world and I will be naked. My pride, not my bottom will be slapped and I’ll cry to be put back. I imagine myself outraged but not too surprised when my potential employer laughs at my resume. “But I know how to make Sesame chicken!” I would say. “The secret is that you put neutra-sweet in the batter. And sir, if you hire me, I can explain to you the mystery of Dry-cleaning!”

Resumes. I’ve thought about resumes. I’ve dreamed about them. Crisp blank white sheets of paper fold themselves into the most elaborate airplanes and fly toward me from every direction like millions of kamikazes rebuking me for my lack of employable skills. I wake in my dorm room sweating and clutch my yellow accordion folder and remind myself that I still have a few more months of sanctuary under the title “Student.”

I know I have to be armed with more than a resume. That is why I have prepared a letter of recommendation from myself. On that inevitable day, I will sit down, smoothing out the skirt of my J.C. Penny’s suit (on sale) and read it aloud. It would go something like this.

Dear Sir, (I’m assuming you are a man)

The truth is that I’ve been working since before I was conscious. I am, in fact, a part of a whole generation of babies watching counters and children minding the store and pre-teen cashiers. Through most of my childhood my parents had a business. The time before I can remember is filled in with vague reports from my mother, who believes actual dates, facts and events have absolutely no association with telling stories. I have been told that, while living in Philadelphia, my father had a “store” of the almost grocery kind which was nominally successful. Like many immigrant business, this was a family business. I imagine the infant-me rolling on a colorful blanket behind the counter while my grandmother, sitting behind the cash machine, watched her Korean soap operas with one eye and stared accusingly at the Black customers with another. I have also been told that, at some point in time, my mother had a small alteration shop. I do remember something about that. I remember red counters. There are always counters. I’ve spent much of my life so far on one side of a cheap, light wood counter separating me from the “son-neem,” the customer. Sometime later, my father with his partner/friend began a thriving business that had something to do with carpentry. My father made things and his partner sold these things. Again, my mother is not a detail-oriented woman. Whatever my father did, it afforded us a whole new lifestyle. It must have felt like living on the other side of the counter where there were middle-men and no customers to be seen only numbers to be counted. We were the customers. We went to real super-markets with brand new carts. We bought a castle, or what seemed a castle to me. There were three stories all with sleek wooden floors. I’d put on my Sunday socks, the white ones I used to fold just right so that the lacey part floated just above my heel. Then, I’d fly across the reflective wood, racing my brother on every floor until the bottoms of my socks were black and my knees blue with bruises. That is my only memory of the castle. We were soon dethroned, betrayed by a member of the court. My father’s business partner and friend had developed a gambling problem and had been secretly gambling away the company money. (It would not be until I was 17 years old that I would be told that my father shared this bad habit with his friend.) At the time, I was five and my family was bankrupt.

We moved to Atlanta, Georgia and my parents found themselves on the bottom rung of the Korean Immigrant ladder. I find it necessary, at this point, to explain, Sir, the Korean Immigrant ladder. Money and English determine your place on the ladder. Dishwashers and waitresses in restaurants that encourage their patrons not to tip occupy the bottom rung. These are usually single men or single women who come to America and live in crowded apartments with cousins. A half step up would involve a restaurant where people tip and hostesses carry menus that have hard covers. Perhaps, a Korean man could learn to throw bowls into his hat and slice up some Japanese-style steak. Then, not only would he have learned a bit more English, he would have to pick-up a little “Domo” and “Sayunara.” The next full step up, where many Koreans start, is entrepreneurship, but as I said, this required more money and more English. You need to know some “bank English” for the second rung. “Bank English” is complicated even for many fluent English speakers. You see second rung folks on television. Appearances include scores of quaint, quiet Korean couples with convenient stores in the unseemly part of town who are witnesses in the murder that happened in the alley behind their dumpsters or unfortunate victims of looting during a riot. The third rung is an accomplishment indeed: family businesses with some Mexican employees, classy restaurants that are advertised as “exotic dining experiences,” and salons with newer immigrants doing manicures and maybe even a white woman answering the phones and yes, dry cleaning with the delicate care of oriental hands. The next step up, the fourth rung, always seemed to me a grand and magical place for Korean immigrants. Now I know that it is somewhere in L.A. The fourth rung is an expansive suburb where Korean real estate agents, Korean dentists and Korean car dealers are seen in Korean ads in Korean newspapers. Before I came to California, in my mind, the fourth rung was a place much like El Dorado, Atlantis or Mars.

In Atlanta, on the bottom rung, my father worked construction during the day and washed dishes at night. My mother was another nameless Korean woman in a dirty Chinese restaurant. My brother and I ate Ichiban Ra-men and played unsupervised and happy not to know we were poor. One day, my brother came home beat-up and missing the new football my parents got him for his 8^th birthday. We didn’t stay much longer after that. We ended up in Panama City, FL, you know, where the “Girls Gone Wild” videos are filmed. Oh, you don’t know? Sir, I meant no offense. You see my father’s sister has a small salon in Panama City. She is a third-rung woman. Her salon is called, Chi, For Beautiful Hair. Many people believe the “Chi” was the “chi” they heard in martial-arts movies. Perhaps, customers hoped to leave the salon with their hair “centered” in a spiritual way. In actuality, my aunt’s name is Yoo Chi-Hyun. It just sounds better than, “Paula, For Beautiful Hair.” Anyways, after waitress-ing and more dishwashing, my parents eventually bought a restaurant from a Chinese woman named Cindy. Thank you for being patient, Sir. I’ve now come to my first real job.

Cindy’s Place, with the sign written in that elongated red script that would leave you in no doubt that it was the destination for fast oriental cuisine, was in the Beach Walk Center on one of the major intersections in town; left to Thomas Drive and the beaches, straight to Front Beach Road and beaches and to the right for Back Beach Road and, you guessed it, beaches. Beach Walk Center’s starting line-up was the Wal-Mart, the Movie Gallery and the coin laundry, cleverly named, “Soap Opera.” Cindy’s Place was nicely situated between the Wal-Mart and the Movie Gallery. It was the “hole-in-the wall,” “mom-and-pop,” “local favorite,” “taste of Asia,” quick-stop for Sweet and Sour Chicken, Beef with Broccoli, and maybe some of those fried things with cream cheese in them. On what little wall space we had, we put up laminated pictures of Chinese characters, a calendar the Korean church gave us for free, some lucky bamboo and framed pictures of dogs playing poker. That was my idea. These tasteful oriental items we put up against the ice cream cone patterned wallpaper. The once-white wallpaper with used-to-be pastel pink and blue ice cream cones spanned an entire wall of the take-out restaurant, remnants of the previous, previous owners. I began this work at 11. I bagged to-go boxes with 2^nd generation vigor. No one really cared that we weren’t Chinese. They didn’t know the difference. What was the food we were serving anyway? It wasn’t Chinese. It was an entirely different genre of food that has its roots in immigrant culture. Do you believe that ancient Cantonese chefs decided to fry Philadelphia cream cheese with some “crab with a K” and serve it to the emperors of old? I’m sorry, you don’t have to answer, Sir. It was meant to be rhetorical. I don’t particularly like them myself, but the white folk who came into the store couldn’t get enough of them. We did well. Some nights, there would be a line out the door.

It was like a great magic show in a top-notch circus. My father was a vision of culinary dexterity. The flames under the round black woks would chase each other upward to grab at my father’s eyelashes. He didn’t mind. He tossed baby corn, water chestnuts and those little straw mushrooms like a master magician tossing cards, handkerchiefs, and shiny coins. Mrs. Pak, the other cook, a quiet, plain Korean woman was like a minor act, not as flashy but she got the job done. My mother, the beautiful assistant, wrote down orders furiously half in Korean half in English in the moments between “Hi, what would you like?” “Hello, Cindy’s Place. Yes, today’s specials are Sweet and Sour Chicken and Chicken with Chinese vegetables.” Well rehearsed, these English phrases came fluidly out of her mouth. Everyone loved her and the customers adored me. I was the final touch. I was like the accommodating midget who waved the audience out with a smile. I made sure the regulars got a little more of the sticky sweet red sauce to go with the crab rangoons, but like every show, we had a few hecklers.

I always thought white people sweat more than Koreans. I feel a sense of confirmation when I recall this man. He had come to fix the broken ice machine. My father had stepped out a moment during the slow afternoon hours leaving just two women and myself (not yet one of those) and the sweaty man. I imagine most people acquire a shiny glare on their foreheads or a little mustache of sweat-beads above their lip and the ubiquitous dark spots under the arms on a hot day; especially in Panama City, FL. which is truly an uninhabitable place for most life-forms. The 100% humidity during most of the year is only appropriate for toads, alligators and topless spring-breakers. Looking at this man, I thought he must have been born with too many pores, pores like caves housing rivers of salty condensation in a constant Niagara Falls-flow of musky perspiration.

“Ma’m, I’m-er all done here. Could I get some egg-rolls to-go?”

“Jay say, you wait,” my mother replied to the man who appeared to have been caught in a torrential downpour.

“Jay say make sure no water under machine,” said my mother handing him the rolls with her magician’s assistant smile. Jay was the name my father chose for himself when he immigrated.

Taking them, he replied, “No water under what? I’m sorry. I didn’t quite understand you. Oh yes, the ice machine. It should be fine.”

Mrs. Pak turned to my mother and, in Korean, said, “This man doesn’t hear well.”

My mother, looking confused, as if to ask, “What other machine do you think I would talk about?” responded with, “You know, last time, after you go, water come, I clean every-ting. Jay come back soon.”

At this point, I had not been paying much attention to the conversation. I simply stared, pondering, “My father stands over a fire most of the day and you just spent 15 minutes in front of an ice machine. Why does my dad look like the Sahara in comparison with you?” At the time I was looking at his face which looked smooth like the surface of stones in a river; in his case, the river flowing from his receding hairline. The man’s expression changed. It took on a false benevolence I immediately disliked. Talking slowly and loudly as if training a dog to sit, he said, “Ma’m, I can’t stay. You know, here in America, we’re very busy. You don’t worry about the ice machine. If Jay has a problem, you can let us men take care of it.”

My mother’s face became very still and I knew what was coming. In my younger years, I lived in fear of that look. I was expecting her to reach for the ruler lying on the counter, which, for my mother, was not an unfamiliar tool of discipline. Instead, she calmly responded. “O.k. you go. We have card and number.”

I watched him walk out. My mother and Mrs. Pak went back to cleaning and cutting vegetables. Later that night, I heard my mother recounting the story to my dad. She got everything right, even mentioning his rancid body odor. I giggled at this from my side of the table in the kitchen where we had our late dinners. My mother is a great storyteller. Her anger took form in the re-telling. Her small frame practically shook with fury, but that didn’t affect her performance. You truly felt like you entered into whatever experiences my mother had lived. My father listened and patted her shoulder, consoling her. They would re-play this ritual for years to come.

Why didn’t I say anything to the sweaty man? I had the words. Why did I stay silent? Maybe, it was because he was on the other side of the counter. He wasn’t even a “son-neem;” he didn’t pay for those egg-rolls. At that age, I still adhered to my mother’s command not to intercede in a conversation between adults.

Later, we moved the restaurant to a bigger lot in the same shopping center and gave it a proper name, Jade Garden. I got a bigger counter to stand behind. Jade Garden even had a few tables for dine-in customers. I want you to know, Sir, that due to my experience at Jade Garden, I am an excellent “multi-tasker.” I scooped fried rice, answered phone orders, bagged to-go boxes, waited on tables, picked up the loose change people left on the wet spots as tips and dealt silently with a number of hecklers like the sweaty man. Like my mother, I went home at night and re-enacted the scene for my parents with a theatre-quality precision that rivaled my mother’s. My parents, in an attempt to make that giant leap to the 3^rd rung, traded the restaurant business for the dry cleaning business. In college, I traded a theatre degree for an English degree. I am currently hunched over a keyboard typing away and my parents are currently hunched over steam presses. Grocery store, restaurant, dry cleaners…Yes, Sir, we are trying to fulfill every Korean-American stereotype. It’s like a contest. My parents do it in hopes of winning 1^st prize. What is 1^st prize? Why, that’s where you come in. 1^st prize is a college education and a job in a place with no counters. Well, sir, what do you say?

Sincerely,

…..