by Frances Cha
The churchwomen chuckled and patted my head. But what she didn’t tell them was that it had taken over a week for the cuts to fade from the backs of my legs after she beat me that night with a branch from a tree in the garden. I had loved that tree very much.
* * *
—
IN THE WINTERS, the house would get so cold that I would wear three or four sweaters at once and burrow under several of my grandmother’s coats that still had the tags on them. Every fall, my aunt and uncle would send a new winter coat from America as a gift for my grandmother, but they were always too big for her, even though they were the smallest American size. Whenever she had company she would bring out the coats to show them off, and if the guests expressed admiration, she would shrug and say they weren’t her size and she was hoping someone would buy them. I was always terrified that someone would rise to the bait, but I guess everyone thought a coat from America would cost too much.
* * *
—
OURS WAS NOT a wealthy neighborhood but the children who went to our school were usually dressed in neat clothes and had things like siblings and haircuts and change to spend in the stationery store. I didn’t know this then, but when I look at the few photos I have from my childhood, I see I am dressed poorly, in my grandmother’s old undershirts. I have never seen a photo of me wearing children’s colors. It was not something I missed or craved or even noticed. The other children did not pick on me, but they did not seek my company either, and so it was a natural thing for me to play alone by the creek after school or in the garden of our church, where one of the nuns had given me a patch to plant things. The nuns, who saw my grandmother every week at services, had a better idea than most people what she was like.
* * *
—
IT WAS a pretty spring day when the letter arrived from America, I remember. Cherry blossoms had erupted over garden walls earlier that week, and my grandmother and I were walking back from the well on the mountain where we pumped our drinking water every few days. The mailman was at our gate.
“Letter from your son in America,” he called, waving when he saw us.
“Really? He writes too often,” said my grandmother merrily. She had not spoken to me for several days, but she was good at hiding her moods from others.
Because she wanted to brag more about the letter, she made a show of opening it on the spot.
“He’s coming to visit this summer,” she said, reading it slowly. “His wife and children too.”
“My goodness! What an event. Is it his first time since he left for America?” The mailman, like the rest of our street, knew about my uncle, the prodigy who had been offered a job at a think tank in America after marrying my aunt, a treasured only child from a wealthy family.
My grandmother pursed her lips. “Yes,” she replied, and then abruptly went inside the gate, leaving him puzzled.
I flew in after her. My cousins were coming! The thought made me dizzy. My cousins, Somin and Hyungshik. I knew all about them from my aunt and uncle’s letters. They were six and three to my eight years and they lived in Washington on a street where no other Asian people lived. Somin went to a school with American children and was learning wonderful things like ballet and soccer and violin while Hyungshik was starting a gymnastics class for toddlers.
My grandmother would plummet into her morose rages every time a letter came, but I would pore over the details in my aunt’s graceful handwriting. My aunt would often include small gifts for me in her packages and letters, and every year she sent an American birthday card with flowers or animals. She also sent photos from Somin’s birthday parties, which always showed her daughter in a frilly dress and a party hat, blowing out candles and surrounded by other little girls and boys, some with yellow or orange hair and skin the color of paper.
“Such ridiculous extravagance for a child!” my grandmother would say angrily before tossing the photos in the trash, or sometimes, if she was in a particularly dark mood, cutting them to pieces with scissors.
I didn’t have high hopes for my younger cousin, Hyungshik—I only had a hazy idea of the physical capabilities of a three-and-a-half-year-old (could he even talk? I didn’t know or care) and he would probably only serve to slow Somin and me down as we played. But I dreamed of taking Somin to my plot in the church garden to show her my flowering cucumber plants, which even my grandmother said made good oiji.
If things went really well, I would also take her to the stationery store next to the market, where the neighborhood children gathered to play on the benches out front. I imagined them whispering to each other about how pretty and interesting she was, Wonna’s cousin, the girl from America.
These were the daydreams I had in those days.
* * *
—
MY FATHER was the second of three sons, but it was my youngest uncle who lived in the big house in America. While my grandmother always belittled my aunt when speaking about her, she always made sure that the gifts my uncle sent from America were on display in the house when company came over. A shiny black camera would be left on the kitchen table, or a pouch of cosmetics would be spilling out on the living room floor.
One time, after her guests had left, she rummaged through her cosmetics bag and said that one of them must have taken her gold cream. At the time it was my grandmother’s most prized possession—a heavy tub of face cream with a gold lid that my aunt had sent the previous month. E-suh-tae Ro-oo-duh was the name of the cream. After going through my little cupboard to make sure I hadn’t taken it, she said that it must have been Mrs. Joo, who had always been bitter that her daughter had been rejected by all three of my grandmother’s sons. My grandmother cursed the poor woman for days with a fearsome breadth of language that I have rarely heard since. I never saw Mrs. Joo at our house again, which saddened me as she tended to have a wrapped yeot candy in her purse and was one of the few women in the village who always had a lovely, motherly smile for me. She once saw me staring at the stationery store from the other side of the street and gave me an abrupt hug and a five-thousand-won bill.
* * *
—
MY GRANDMOTHER often got into bitter fights over money. Sometimes it was with a shopkeeper who she said had cheated her, or sometimes it was with her sisters, who looked and talked like her and were just as nasty. Her only brother—the youngest of four siblings—had married a poor girl, and the abuse my grandmother and her sisters heaped upon her over the first few years of their marriage caused them to run away to China.
In contrast, my uncle in America not only had married rich but also was the only one of her sons who was making good money. The other sons she treated like idiots—I still to this day don’t know what my oldest uncle did for a living—but she reserved the most contempt for my father, who had gone to a good college but worked at a sanitation company. It was the greatest irony in the world that she had taken in the child of the son who humiliated her the most, she often said to me.
On top of his poor choice of job, his most grievous offense was his choice of wife. “Insolent, stuck-up bitch” was how my grandmother referred to my mother. “I should have pushed her into the river long ago, when she was pregnant with you,” she said to me.
Over the years, I gathered that my mother’s family had erred in sending an insulting dowry that had not included the mink coat or the handbag my grandmother had hinted at throughout the engagement. My mother also had worn “unacceptable, arrogant” expressions on her face during her first year of marriage, when my parents lived with my grandmother.
When people asked why I lived with her, my grandmother said my parents had asked her to take me for a few years while my father went to work in South America. “He’s an international project manager, you know,” she said. “They couldn’t have a baby girl where there are wild animals in the jungle!”
When I was particularly bad,
she told me that she would send me to the orphanage in the next town over and no one—especially my parents—would even notice. “When the boy is born, the daughter is cold rice anyway,” she said. “Time to throw away.”
Her eyes would fold into a smile when she said these things.
* * *
—
THE WEEK my cousins finally arrived, my grandmother hid every present that aunt and uncle had sent her over the years. I don’t even know where she put them all—she must have taken them to her sisters’ houses.
I don’t know if she was born like this, or if my grandfather’s early death had made her go a little insane.
* * *
—
BUT HOW EXCITED I was! Tremors ran up and down my small body when I woke up on the day they were supposed to arrive. I waited in the garden for hours in the morning, imagining I heard the footsteps. But it was only when I finally went back into the house in the afternoon that I heard the noise of a car outside our gate.
Through the window, I watched them open the gate and walk down our stone path—my stylish young aunt holding Hyungshik as if he were a baby, and Somin, in a sun-colored dress, skipping from one slab to the next. The three of them—my aunt, Hyungshik, and Somin—I could see their unusual brightness even from inside the house. There is something about happy people—their eyes are clear and their shoulders hang lower on their bodies.
My uncle, however—as he closed the gate and looked toward the house, I saw from his expression that he was one of us. He stood at the gate for a minute and I could see that he did not want to come in.
* * *
—
I STILL REMEMBER the sunflower dress my cousin was wearing that day. It flared out at the waist in a way I had never seen a dress do, and she had a matching yellow and red hairband adorned with a tiny sunflower. And her gold shoes! I think that was the first time I was ever struck speechless by the power of clothing.
* * *
—
WHILE MY AUNT was opening the suitcase of gifts they had brought from America, my grandmother had a look on her face that I knew meant serious trouble.
“Can I show Somin my vegetable garden in the churchyard?” I asked quickly. My uncle said yes and patted my head. He felt very sorry for me, I could see that.
“It’s not too far, is it?” my aunt asked, a little worried. “Will they be okay on their own?”
“This isn’t America,” my grandmother said in a steely voice. “There are no madmen with guns. The children will be fine.”
“Me too!” said Hyungshik, tugging at Somin’s hand.
“Yes, you too,” said my uncle, gazing at him with such fondness that it made me look away. Then my uncle met my eye and he and I knew that a scene was coming. He wanted both of his children out of the house when it happened.
“Let’s go then,” I said, springing up.
* * *
—
I TOOK the long way to the church, up the little hill behind our house and past the shops at the end of the street. It was my aim to spend as much time out, and to have as many people see my expensively dressed cousins, as possible—this was a way of thinking that I had picked up from my grandmother, perhaps.
To my disappointment we only passed two or three people I did not know, and no one I wanted to see. The only thing I had accomplished by taking the long way was to make Hyungshik tired.
“My feet hurt,” he whined, kicking at the curb. “I want to go back to my daddy. This is boring.”
I looked at him with hatred welling in my chest. The walk was not going anything like I had hoped. Somin had not been very responsive as I’d chattered nervously about the nuns at the church, especially Sister Maria, who was my favorite. She was more preoccupied with getting Hyungshik to behave. He was walking erratically—lurching along for a few steps, then swaying from side to side. “Look, I’m a dead elephant,” he would say with a giggle. And then he would whine again about being tired.
Instead of yelling at him, Somin laughed too. I couldn’t understand why she was being so nice to him. She kept taking Hyungshik’s hand, even as he would shake it off, and she would make a game out of it. “Look, I caught you!” she said.
I gave up talking to her while she was so preoccupied with her brother and sullenly led the way to the church. When we finally reached the church garden, I could have cried with relief. My small plot was in the far corner, right on the stream bank, and I had spent the entire summer making it into an orderly vision of beauty, with geometrically strung cucumbers and green peppers and squash.
“Here it is,” I said with a dramatic sweep of the arm. Sister Maria had told me kindly the week before that she had never seen so many cucumbers from one flowering plant.
“This is your garden?” Somin was looking at me with her eyebrow raised. “This is why you made us walk that entire way? My garden in Washington is twenty times bigger than this,” she said, starting to laugh. When she saw my face, she must have felt bad because she stopped talking, but Hyungshik had started to laugh too and then he broke away from her grip and ran toward my cucumber plants at top speed.
“Oiiii!” he yelled and reached for a particularly large one that I had been watching for days, grasping it with all his might. He did not see that it was covered with spikes.
The pain must have been delayed because he didn’t start shrieking until a few seconds later, and then I watched as he clutched the thorny cucumber even tighter.
We both started running toward him—Somin and I—but I got to him first and wrenched his hand free and pulled him toward me by the back of his shirt. But he began screaming even louder, startling me, so I let go abruptly, causing him to trip and fall face-forward into my cucumber plant.
* * *
—
THE SCENE—I CAN see it, perfectly, in its entirety—the sky, the garden, Hyungshik’s eyes, the gashes—it comes to me often. The horror of it all. I cannot wish it away.
Hyungshik gets up, and as he lifts his face, crying hysterically, we can see that it is bleeding. His face has gotten caught on some of the wires I’d rigged to support the vines. He puts his hands to his face and then sees the blood on his hands. When I start toward him again, he begins backing away, even as he keeps screaming.
* * *
—
A FEW YEARS AGO, during my junior year of college, my father actually took me to a mental health clinic. It was a small second-floor office in Itaewon, across the street from the tree-shielded American base. There were still prostitutes and hawkers and late-night murders in Itaewon back then, but it was the only neighborhood with a handful of psychiatrists who would accept cash on the spot and no questions asked about insurance or patients’ names.
After circling to find a spot, my father finally parked the car in a hotel lot, something I had never seen him do before. It was a sign that he had resigned himself to spend some serious money that afternoon.
He had recently discovered that I had stopped going to classes, and instead was spending my days in a comic book café, immersed in piles of comic books. One of the ladies who worked in the supermarket next door tattled on me—she lived in our apartment and told my father that I was hanging out all the time looking homeless.
I had no answer for my parents when they asked, then yelled about why I had stopped attending classes. “You know exactly how much tuition is!” my father stammered in his anger. “Do you think we have money to throw away like that!” My stepmother just rocked back and forth in silent agitation.
I had no desire anymore to go to school. My major was a joke and so was my school. I would not be able to find a job since my father had been forced into retirement from his company at fifty-five and so had no “pull” anymore, which was what anyone needed to get employment. So what was the point?
Leave me alone, I wanted to say. Besides, you owe me.
But I didn’t say it—I didn’t say anything at all when he slapped me hard across the face and threatened to shave off my hair.
At night, I heard them discussing me in low tones in their bedroom. It was about a week after that that he told me he was taking me to talk to somebody in Itaewon.
“Do I have to speak English?” I asked, alarmed when I saw the English signs on the building and a heavy blond American woman emerging from the door that said, MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELING AVAILABLE.
“She speaks Korean,” he said. “I’ll wait here.” He pointed to the fast-food restaurant across the street. “Call me when it’s time to pay.”
I thought about just walking away, but in the end curiosity propelled me. I had never seen a therapist before and haven’t since, and I was curious what sorcery elicited these precipitous prices.
So we sat there, the therapist and I, for an hour of valiant, gentle parrying on her part. She was a disappointment to the imagination in both looks and speech, from the moment she walked into the small room wearing a cheap nylon sweater and faded pants that hardly inspired any respect, let alone soul-sharing.
“Would you like to talk about school? Why do you feel like you can’t go to class?”
“I don’t know.”
She consulted her pad of paper. “Do you think you can talk to me about the blinding of your cousin when you were a child? I understand it was a freak accident.”
“What? No.”
My father paid for the hour, cash, in a fat wad of ten-thousand-won bills that made me flinch, but he looked relieved. For that much money, copious fixing must have taken place. I could see him recommending this to his friends in the future—an instant solution! An American-educated therapist!
