by Patti Kim
Within three pages, I had written my aunt’s life story. She was abused and driven to insanity by her father, stepmother, and brothers. Her father sold her into a marriage in order to have his debts canceled. Her husband tormented her emotionally, physically, and mentally. My aunt then ran away from her home to live in a Buddhist temple, where she cooked meals for the monks. Haunted by past memories, she returned to the family with poisoned rice cakes. Her father, stepmother, and brothers gladly ate them and died instantly. Aunt Han-il burned down the house, emigrated to America, worked as a secretary in a doctor’s office, married a Ph.D., had two daughters, and lived happily ever after.
My teacher said that I had enough material for an entire novel, and I could not possibly do justice to my aunt’s life in three pages. The ending was artificial and contrived. Returning my story to me, she asked, “Ahn Joo, do you ever hear voices?” Without giving me a chance to respond, she told me to listen to them.
When I laid down in the center of my room with my palms pressed on the floor and my eyes closed, I heard the voice of my mother. She told me to do this and do that, don’t do this and don’t do that, you’re good enough for this, but not good enough for that. I memorized the way she sounded, so that when I woke up, I could go to my notebook and record it.
* * *
Third place went to a Japanese girl, who wrote a diary comparing and contrasting her life in Kyoto with her life in Arlington; second place went to a boy, who wrote about his blind father reading him and his little brother bedtime stories in the dark; runner-up was awarded to an essay called “How to Save the World Through Arts and Crafts,” written by my classmate, Jennifer Beechum, whose father was a well-known painter of some sort; and I was awarded first place for my piece, “The Voice of My Mother.”
My teacher returned it to me with a gold star on the top right corner of the first page. She said that it was a mature, honest, powerful, poignant, and sophisticated piece of writing, and I should give serious thought to becoming a writer some day. Jennifer Beechum and I were to read our writings during our graduation ceremony.
My father could not attend my graduation ceremony, which was held on a Wednesday in the middle of the afternoon, because he was working in Washington, D.C. When I showed him my report card for the final marking period and told him I had won first place for a story I had written about Mother, he asked, “What did you say? What did you say about her?” To put him at ease, I lied and told him I had written about the time she made me mussel soup for my birthday.
“I’m reading it tomorrow for graduation,” I said.
Glancing at my report card, he poured more milk into my glass and said that graduating from elementary school was only the first step. Graduating from college, now that would be a real accomplishment. He looked at my report card again, pointed at all my A’s, and told me I was his only hope.
“I hate milk,” I said.
“Drink it or you’ll stop growing,” he said and put a spoonful of rice into his mouth.
That night I went to bed early because I could not hold back my tears. In bed I told myself to stop or else my eyes would swell and reading with swollen eyes was impossible. Clearing my throat, I practiced saying aloud: “My name is Ahn Joo Cho, and my essay is called ‘The Voice of My Mother.’ I have written something called ‘The Voice of My Mother,’ which I will be reading to you today. ‘The Voice of My Mother,’ a prose poem by Ahn Joo Cho…” And I reminded myself never to say thank you. Why should I, like a leper, beggar, orphan, thank them for listening to me?
* * *
When the principal called my name, Ahn Joo Cho, as the recipient of this year’s Young Writers Award, I stood up and walked with bowed head to the podium where the microphone was waiting for me. Jennifer Beechum had already read her essay and she had received great applause that I did not think my reading would match. She had family in the audience, who clapped and yelped and blew sharp whistles her way. The auditorium was full. At the foot of the stage the school band was getting ready to play the closing song. My teachers were scattered throughout the room. The clock on the opposite wall read 12:30. I pulled down the microphone, cleared my throat, and in my most confident voice said, “This is The Voice of My Mother.’ She passed away a year ago.
“Chew on parsley if your mouth tastes old. Smear chicken grease on your lips so no one will think you go hungry. Boiled dandelion leaves with sesame oil and seeds make you go to the bathroom. Raisins soaked in soju relax your muscles. Chew gum, it’ll help you digest. But don’t chew gum like that with your teeth showing. Just like those country cows. No one wants to see your crooked teeth. When you smile, keep your lips together. Don’t scrunch up your nose and eyes like that when you laugh—you’ll get wrinkles. Why do you laugh so loudly? What do you have to laugh about? What do you have to cry about? Did your mother die? Is that why you cry? Or are you crying because your mother’s still alive? Are you going to stop the tears or not? Stop biting your nails. They’ll think you go so hungry, you have to eat yourself. Who taught you to eat your fish like that? You leave all the good parts. Suck out the fish eyes, they’ll make you see better. Don’t make me buy you eyeglasses. Where do you go to buy eyeglasses here? Suck out the fish brain, it’ll help you speak English. Then you can go buy your own eyeglasses. Chew on the bones, but don’t swallow them. Chew and spit them out. America has no place to remove fish bones from a stupid girl’s throat. Girls stupid enough to swallow fish bones deserve to choke. Don’t hold your rice bowl in the palm of your hand. You want to make me a mother of a peasant? At home, eat slowly; outside, eat fast or everyone else will eat your seconds and thirds. But don’t eat like you haven’t been fed. Eat like a lady. Get your seconds and thirds, like a lady. But get your seconds and thirds. What do they feed you at school? Do you get enough? Crazy girl. Why aren’t you eating? What are you going to live on? If you don’t eat, you’re going to be a midget. You’ll never grow as tall as these American girls. Don’t you want to look like them? Don’t you want to be Miss America? Eat. Your hair won’t grow. You won’t ever need a bra. Your teeth will fall out. You’ll stay ugly like that forever. Who’s going to marry you? We’ll have to send you back to the bridge where the lepers live. That’s where we found you, underneath a bridge. You don’t belong to me. No child of mine sucks on ice cubes used to freeze fish. Get away from me. You’re so dirty. I can’t believe you’re sucking on those ice cubes. No one’s going to marry you. Again? You’re crying again? What do I have to do? You want butter and soy sauce in your rice? You want fried kimchi? You want fried anchovies, pork dumplings, kelp? Stop complaining. The cabbage here isn’t the same. What do you want me to do, fly to Korea? How am I supposed to make you shik keh in this country? Even if I could, I wouldn’t make it for a selfish, picky girl like you. You should know. You expect to find jja jjang myun here? Been deh dduck, paht bing su, ho dduck—in America? Eat what you have or starve. What do you want me to do? You want pink fish eggs, green fish cakes? You want rice cakes, don’t you? You want dates and pine nuts? Where am I going to find rice cakes? Ahn Joo-yah, what are you crying for? Did your mother die? What are you crying for?”
There was an uncomfortable silence in the auditorium. When I looked up, I caught sight of my teacher, leaning against the kitchen door with her right hand over her heart. The two flute players below me yawned. There was a shuffling in the back where mothers began setting up trays of cookies, cakes, and donuts. When I said, “The end,” the audience politely applauded. I reluctantly bowed, said thank you, and returned to my seat, where Jennifer Beechum, elbowing me, said, “Way too weird. Way too dark. Way too depressing.”
That evening, my father brought home an electric typewriter that was missing its A and E keys and told me not to make any rice for tomorrow’s dinner because he was going to take me to a Chinese restaurant. He asked how graduation ceremony went. Showing him my writing, proudly wearing its gold star, I told him I had read it aloud without making a single mistake, without stuttering once. He
skimmed through the pages, palmed my head, tilted my neck back, and said that my writing was the prettiest he had ever seen.
10
When I told my father that a black boy on my bus was flicking cigarette ashes onto my head and telling me to bend over, he said he would drive me to my junior high school every morning. When I told him some girls laughed at my green jeans, my father said that he would buy me blue ones although green was a good color. When I told him my English teacher secretly drank Scotch out of her Dr. Pepper can and often fell asleep before finishing her sentences, and Miles the janitor was caught masturbating behind the trash bins during my lunch period, and the only thing my depressed algebra teacher ever talked about was his recent divorce, and some of the older students did not yet know the difference between a noun and a verb, a prepositional phrase and its object, the subject from the predicate, and I began bleeding, my father folded the Korean Times onto his lap and told me to pack, because we would be moving to Morning Glory Way in Potomac, Maryland.
* * *
On Halloween, my father enrolled me in my new school, called Weston Junior High, a five-minute walk from our new home. He walked me through the main entrance, dropped me off at the door of the main office, and reminded me to turn on the rice maker when I got home. Handing me a ten-dollar bill for lunch money, he asked if I had washed my hair in the morning because it looked oily. Looking at the other students passing in the hallway, he told me my blue jeans fit well on me and that I was a smart girl. I turned the knob of the door, said good-bye, and went inside.
When the school secretary asked what my father’s employment was, I told her he was self-employed, a proprietor of some sort, had his own business here and there. When she asked what my mother did for a living, I told her she passed away when I was three years old from cancer.
“It’s just my father and me,” I said.
“Your counselor will be Mrs. Hubbel. She handles all the students whose last names begin with A through E. She’ll have your schedule. Her office is right there,” the secretary said, pointing my folder at the door with a paper jack-o’-lantern. “Once you see her, you’ll be all set for your first day.” I took my folder and waited outside Mrs. Hubbel’s office. The paper jack-o’-lantern had sharp, jagged teeth, and dangling arms and legs made from black yarn. “Honey, you can go ahead and knock. Go ahead and knock,” the secretary said, shaking her bangled wrist at me.
After my first two weeks of school, Mrs. Hubbel got it into her head that I was a troubled adolescent and made me meet with her daily for fifteen minutes to get to the bottom of all this. I had stolen a bottle of Giorgio perfume from the gym locker of a cheerleader, whose father was the president of Woodward & Lothrop. I had written pornographic love letters to Melissa Fintz, who ate her peanut butter and apple sandwiches alone in the cafeteria while reading useless teenage love stories. During gym, I had kicked the soccer ball into Jane Jordan’s face when a game wasn’t yet in session. I had cheated on my science quiz by sitting on my notes about cumulus clouds. I had torn off birthday balloons and streamers from someone’s decorated locker. I had stolen books from the library.
Pitchforked veins grew from the pupils of Mrs. Hubbel’s gray eyes.
She sat me next to her behind her desk. From her leather-upholstered, swiveling recliner, she leaned down at me and said, “If you want to succeed here and in your life, you must focus, concentrate, and apply yourself. My dear, you must apply yourself. I know adjusting to a new school is difficult, but you were not meant to be a delinquent.” When I returned her advice with a blank stare, she grabbed my shoulders, shook me, and looking me straight in the eyes said, “Do you know how brilliant you are? Apply yourself.”
She made me play games with her. Word association. When she said “blue,” I said “sky.” When she said “spider,” I said “web.” Black, night. Father, mother. Brother, sister. When I told Mrs. Hubbel to stop, she said, No, go.
When she asked how things were at home, I told her they were all right. When she asked what my favorite food was, I told her none in particular. The happiest moment in my life? I told her last Christmas was the happiest moment in my life. She asked why. I gave her my I-don’t-know-and-I-don’t-care shrug. Clearing her throat, she calmly told me to complete an I-feel sentence. I told her I felt fine.
I feel. I feel. I feel dumb like the rubber stiffs in CPR class, except I have no one to pump my heart one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, four-one thousand times, then blow breath into me. I feel retarded and limbless like Boris Brace Boy Bulber, who now lives somewhere in Texas with his mother and father. I feel like breaking those curved wooden calligraphy pens into splinters and coloring South America black. I feel like telling Mrs. Hubbel that I know her games and tricks and that she’ll never figure out why I’m failing all my subjects. She’ll have no notes to scribble on her legal notepad and tuck away into the manila folder labeled “Cho, A. J. #127.”
Stop asking me why I lied about my mother. I don’t know where she disappeared to. I feel like stopping. I feel like stopping the bells from ringing every fifty minutes. I don’t remember my locker combination. I can’t run four times around the track within eight minutes. What do I do during flex time? I don’t know where to go during flex time. There is no one to follow, no one to talk with, no one to ask where she bought her designer jeans and Docksiders. I feel like eating my lunch in the cafeteria at a table where my elbows can bump into other human elbows, rather than the metal graffiti walls of the toilet stall, and where I can hear conversations that don’t come over the walls between flushes left and right of me. They won’t let me sit in front of my locker and eat, they won’t let me sit in the library and read, because it’s our designated thirty-five minutes to take our afternoon meal.
I don’t know the difference between integrals, derivatives, arc cosine, and sine for trigonometry. They put me in the wrong math class. I didn’t ask to be put in a gifted and talented trigonometry, but they put me in anyway because I was quiet, looked Chinese, and wore glasses. I haven’t even memorized my postulates and theorems for geometry, and doesn’t geometry come before trigonometry? I don’t have a baked potato for lab science. I won’t dribble, run, jump, and throw the basketball through the hoop or underline the prepositional phrases, circle the prepositions, bracket the object of the preposition, and sing all the prepositions in alphabetical order to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”: about, above, across, after, against, among, around, at, before, beside, between, beyond, by, down … What is the use? I want to read Jocasta’s part, but I can’t read it aloud without gasping for breath after every three words. But tell me, gasp, Oedipus, may I, gasp, not also know, gasp, what scares you, gasp, so? How am I supposed to give an oral report on how to use an abacus? I know how to use one, but how do I tell forty people?
I feel like rolling an iron ball down the hall to split the clusters of fours and sixes lingering near the lockers, talking amongst themselves about going to a movie Friday night—my mother will drive us, your father can pick us up, let’s not ask her, she’s such a nerd, did you know that Ellen and Chris kissed?
* * *
At nights in my new bed and my new room, I told myself that I was far superior to all of them. They were mere pigs living lives of mediocrity. There was no depth in their thinking; they were preoccupied with kiwi-flavored lip gloss, the hemline of their skirts, love notes folded into the shape of stars. They knew nothing of pain and suffering. To them, pain was not seeing their names typed on next year’s cheerleader list. They drew red hearts on the margins of their world studies notes. They became embarrassed seeing their domestic help drag her flip-flops into the classroom with disheveled hair, smelling of disinfectant, a brown bag lunch in one hand, and a plastic bag holding a pink retainer in the other.
The students were simpletons who decorated other simpletons’ lockers with streamers and balloons; all to ensure the returned favor on their own birthdays. And the teachers, who scribbled fractions of truths
onto yellowing transparencies, leaned against overhead projectors that gave off more warmth than their own hearts.
I was not doing well in Weston Junior High, and I frantically searched through my father’s dresser drawers because I wanted my mother.
Hidden in the tube of a brown sock were the three pictures of my mother:
On the other side of this photograph, there was a date. It was taken on June 14, 1954. My mother was ten years old. She smiled, while her little brother pouted. That was how Min Joo and I looked when we stood side by side. The last I heard, my uncle died of a heart attack. His ashes were tossed into a creek. I do not know what has happened to my mother. Sometimes I wish she has also died of a heart attack. I wish her ashes have already been scattered. Other times I wish she would come back and tell me how pretty my face has become.
For weeks I practiced holding my head in the same position, smiled so that dimples formed on my cheeks and my eyes took on the shape of the moon, wore a wide-collared white cotton blouse with a blue bandanna around my neck, and tried to live in a world that was black and white.
This is my mother with my best friend, Na-Ri. Our families went to the beach together. I wanted my mother to grab me and pull me into the picture, but Na-Ri was closer to her. Na-Ri’s mother had a grocery store that sold instant noodles, cold red bean soup, fried dough stuffed with melted brown sugar, and piles and piles of notebooks stacked next to the front door, against the freezer, and on the shelves beside the cash register. Metal spiral notebooks, plastic spiral, lined, unlined. Pages as thick as rice paper; pages as thin as onion skin. Covers with drawings of blue birds, red shoes, elephant ears, and goldfish with puckered mouths blowing bubbles that contained the American words, I love you, Forget me not, Will you be mine?
