by Patti Kim
That evening, I had taken apart my father’s handiwork. It was a beautiful cage with a wooden frame, sanded corners, a door with hinges, a bed of spinach, lettuce, and dandelion leaves, and a shingled roof to shield the rabbit from the sun and rain.
Finally, our street was quiet, and I could hear Mr. Smith’s telephone ringing. After heating the soup, I went outside to the swing set, where my father was oiling the metal rings from which the chains hung. He said it was squeaking a bit. There were white salonpas patches on the back of his neck, behind his left ear, and on his right elbow. When he wore one on the back of his neck, it meant his head was aching.
Sitting in the middle of the swing seat, I said, “Dinner’s ready.”
My father put down the oilcan and pushed me from behind. “I’ll push it higher,” he said.
“Stop, I’m going to throw up,” I said and hopped off.
Stopping the swing, he got on himself, and told me to sit by him. I could smell the menthol of the salonpas patches and noticed that my father was beginning to bald. Crickets were singing to each other. Traces of conversation came from another backyard, and someone was having a barbecue. The swing set faced my father’s garden, and I stared at the patch of perilla leaves, squash, tomatoes, and the single eggplant that looked like a big fat purple teardrop. When he pushed his feet against the grass to swing a little higher, I told him the tree would come crashing down on us, roots and all. As he yawned and rubbed his left eye with his thumb, he told me that when he was a boy in Korea, he had built a swing out of nothing but a piece of rope and some branches. He had built it on the cypress tree next to the village well.
There were many stories about the village well: drownings of newborns, drownings of virgins, spirits that rose from its water, faces that appeared on its surface. My father could have built his swing on the apple tree that grew on his family’s farm, but his stepmother wouldn’t let him. She was afraid he would snatch an apple and have one less to sell at the market. The apples grew as large as a man’s fists, and they tasted sweet. My father had stolen one the night a fire broke out in another villager’s outhouse. He had dug a hole in the ground, lined it with flat rocks, and hid the apple that needed a day to ripen. When he returned to the hole, a juicy red apple awaited him. It was the only time he had eaten from his family’s apple tree.
“My oldest brother, the one who called, he tried to eat from that tree, but our stepmother caught him and he was beaten badly. He simply stood there, not saying a word, taking the beating. He never fought back. He couldn’t even walk straight for a week. I think that’s how he got his stutter.”
My father held onto to the chain and stared down into his garden. It was getting dark, and I could see the calendar hanging on our refrigerator door in the lighted kitchen. Hearing the sound of an airplane flying over us, my father said that it always excited him to hear an airplane passing by. When he was a boy and war planes flew over his village, he would point to the sky and scream out, “It’s the nose people, it’s the nose people!” because Americans had such tall and pointy noses. When my father was sixteen years old, he had an American pen pal, Naomi Jordan of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. On her birthday, he had sent her a compact and lipstick. He had kept her letters. Her handwriting was beautiful. Before my father could turn to me and beg me to track her down for him, I got off the swing and said that dinner was getting cold, and the soup was no good if more than a day old.
Catching me by the wrist, my father asked me if I had written anything. I told him I was working on my longest story and had written more than half of it already.
“Go get it. Let me hear it,” he said.
“I can’t read it out here. It’s too dark.”
“Then you turn the light on when you come back.”
“Dad, it’s not finished yet. It’s not that good.”
“Let me hear it,” he said, and smiled at me.
When I returned to the swing with my pages of writing, my father was holding the eggplant in his hand. He said that if it grew too large, the skin would toughen and its insides would go bitter, that we had to eat it while it was tender and sweet. As I held my pages underneath our deck light and shooed off mosquitos and gnats, I told my father the story wasn’t finished yet, and if anything sounded confusing, to stop me.
“Just read,” he said.
“All right,” I said. I cleared my throat to read aloud to my father what I had written so far: “A village schoolteacher calling roll in front of his class of children whose parents were rice, barley, potato, or rabbit farmers threw his chalk at the boy in the back, who never washed, never wore shoes, and had already fallen asleep next to his puddle of drool.”
“Where’s school?” my father interrupted.
“In Korea. You’ve got to hear the rest of it, though. Just wait. It comes up in the next sentence,” I said, and continued. “The chalk hit the shoulder of the sleeping boy’s desk partner whose older brother had run away to Seoul to make a life for himself in the city because the filthy country was only full of dirt-work, pulling and planting and eating weeds that grew out of cow dung, and he wanted to work in a government office. Many of the young men and women villagers wanted to work in a government office, especially the women who had finished high school, but could not go on to college. They wanted to be typists or copiers and maybe meet a higher-ranking office worker who was still a bachelor. They could marry, live in one of the new high-rise apartments in Seoul, and have a child or two. What an impossible dream! Either that or meet an American man while working as a typist in an army office, the way one young woman did, except she married a black man, and her mother and father would not let her enter the village or enter the house, not even for a visit, because marrying an American was one thing—but a black man? She was locked out. So the black man took his new wife to America, where they lived in a high-rise apartment with a balcony overlooking streets, cars, people, a purple mountain and a raging sea. There were many women who married American men.”
“Do you want to marry American man?” my father interrupted.
“Dad, that’s what you told me. It’s not about me. Do you want me to read or not?” I asked.
He nodded for me to continue. “There were many women who married American men. And if they had younger sisters, the girls tried on their lace underwear and slips and smeared Pond’s Cold Cream on their faces, necks, arms, and legs, thinking it was lotion, and besides, anything made in America was good for you. Even the peasants with squash-shaped heads knew that. American chewing gum, American cola, American cigarettes were worth a month’s worth of wages. If the teacher were to ask his students what they wanted to do when they were older, they would answer, either work as a clerk for the government or become a nurse, doctor, or teacher or live in America. Nobody wanted to be a farmer, potter, sea diver, fishmonger, or popcorn, fruit, rubber shoe seller like their mothers and fathers, who began work before the sun rose and came home to a bowl of barley, a basket of lettuce, bean paste sauce, and a pot of lukewarm cabbage soup after the sun set. In the winter, they ate inside on the heated floor. In spring, summer, and fall, they ate outside on the veranda, while watching uncle climb a crooked ladder to patch a hole in the thatched roof, little brother chase a rat, and mother with food in her mouth yell at them to come and eat the meal she had cooked. The uncle wasn’t hungry.…”
I stopped, noticing my father was yawning. I told him the soup was surely cold by now and my throat was dry from the reading. “Let’s go inside. I’ll finish it later,” I said.
“If it’s cold, then it’s cold. Just finish it right now,” he said. “Just finish it.”
I skipped a page and read about a young woman. “The young woman was a bit uncertain and hesitant, but she did not show it because she loved the young man, who was so eager to please her. Caressing her cheek, he said he would take care of her, take her away from her father and four brothers, who only made her work. He kissed her coarse hands, telling her she was made for more than farm an
d housework. Farm and housework was not the reason one mother was packing her bags to leave her husband and two daughters. While her daughters were at school and her husband at work in the rice mill, she stayed home and drank bowls of expensive coffee until a well-dressed man in eyeglasses, a silk tie, and polished shoes knocked at her gate to use her telephone. He told her she was beautiful and asked if he could join her for a cup of coffee. She was restless and lonely and tired of being teased by her friends because her husband worked in a rice mill. She wanted to live a bigger life. So she let the man return to the house two, three, four times, and when he told her he had to go tend to his orchard of orange trees on Cheju Island, she said she would follow him. She would follow him anywhere. ‘Please let me go with you,’ she begged him in a low whisper, which he could hardly hear because the old woman next door was wailing about her oldest son, who had died of a heart attack a week ago. The mother wailed, while a boy three houses away yelled from outside his gate, ‘I am a thief. I am a thief. I am a thief,’ as a punishment from his father for having stolen his stepmother’s gold ring. He wanted to trade it for comic books, chewing gum, Popsicles, and a kite that would surely fly higher than any of the other boys’ in the village.
“Fly high, high, high, swooping over the peak of the One-Hundred-Year-Old Mountain, where a temple was carved on its sloping side. A Buddha with smooth stone joints sat erect, looking down on the three piles of carefully stacked pebbles beside its left knee. On the second step of the tile-roofed temple housing the monks lay a row of white rubber shoes. The servant, who was a seventeen-year-old girl, swept those steps of the leaves that fell in autumn, snow in winter, and rain in spring. She walked with a limp and suffered pain when she had to straighten her back to light the candles on the high shelves. She was told suffering would purify her soul. So, when she waited for the large pot of rice to finish steaming to feed the monks with and remembered her poor mother, she sighed and tried to hold back her tears for the sake of her soul. Her poor mother. She remembered how her father had pulled her mother by the hair, dragging her body toward the door because she had sneaked out of the house in the afternoon to meet her friends, who laughed, sang, imitated their husbands, and told stories. She had worn her colorful clothes beneath the gray full-length skirt and heavy sweater, pretending to go to market, but turned the corner into her friend’s house, where the music came from.
“When the servant girl saw her mother last, she was counting and recounting the five dried red peppers laid out on her skirt, dividing them among her invisible friends and telling stories about her son, who was a famous doctor in the city. She said he was coming to visit her, and when he came, she would take him around the village from door to door to show him off because he was a handsome man. She had no sons. Like the mother of four daughters, who rubbed her hands under the moon praying the fifth child would be a boy or else her mother-in-law would demand her husband take another woman, who was able to bear him a son. The oldest daughter cut her and her sisters’ hair to boys’ length and told them to deepen their voices because it was their faults their mother threw up all her food.
“The mother finally had her son, but soon after the birth, she left her five children and husband to live on Cheju Island as a sea diver for oysters, clams, sea cucumbers, and worms. She was losing her hearing. The silence at the bottom of the sea met her on land, and she could not hear the prices her customers called out. She read their lips. In a loud voice, she called out a more reasonable price. Her children were forgotten in the sea. ‘From sea to shining sea’ were the words to an American song one woman had learned while living with an American man in the basement of a house owned by an elderly couple, who lived upstairs and constantly told her how beautiful her hair was. But mice lived in the basement as well, and they reminded her of the huge rats at the orphanage that bit her in her sleep. Whenever she heard scratching or squeaking, she jumped on the bed, slapping her face as if fighting off crawling insects and screaming for her mother in Korean.
“At first, the American man was understanding. He gently held and rocked her to sleep, calling her his baby, sweet little baby, there, there, you’re safe in my arms. But after a few months, he grew tired of her broken English, her broken ways, and got into the habit of striking her whenever she jumped on the bed. When that didn’t stop her outbursts, he held a mouse by its tail over her head, threatening to drop it on her beautiful hair if she didn’t shut the hell up because she was giving him a fucking headache. During those nights, she tried to remember the face of her elder sister, who she dreamed was eating delicious foods and wearing pretty dresses, living in a house of her own. And she hoped to see her again someday, which was unlikely because her sister had returned to Korea to a remote village in a country and worked in a winehouse, entertaining men with her piano playing, singing, and if they were willing to pay, a private room for the night. It rarely happened that a winehouse girl met a man who would marry her, but she did because she happened to know the music and words to his favorite song: ‘I’m just a lonely boy, lonely and blue, I’m all alone with nothing to do.… All I want is someone to love, someone to kiss, someone to hold, somebody, somebody, somebody, please.…’”
My father’s eyes were closed, and the night wind was gently swinging us. I tapped him on the shoulder. When he opened his eyes, I told him that was all I had written so far, that I tried to get everything he had told me down, that my throat was hurting, and I was hungry. He nodded in agreement, and we walked into our kitchen.
The next morning, my father did not go into the store and I did not go to school because on his chest, right over his heart, and all across his left side, ending at the center of his spine, were red, inflamed lesions. The pain would not let my father move. He told me to boil dandelion leaves, take him to his acupuncturist, and hang a crucifix on the center of his headboard.
I drove him from doctor to doctor. Those Korean doctors could not tell us what the hell was wrong with him; they said he had liver problems, indigestion, maybe preliminary signs of heart disease, allergies, a pulled muscle from his daily sit-ups, too much stress from work. At the end of the day, I drove him to the emergency room at the hospital, and as we waited, I told my father that this was all because of Grandfather. “He’s haunting you,” I said. “You’ve got to get him out. You’ve got to talk him out. He’s an asshole. Talk about it.” He answered me with a one-syllable grunt, in agreement or disagreement or simply to shut me up.
A bearded doctor examined my father and diagnosed him with shingles. Shingles! What a lovely simple sound. It rhymed with jingles, tingles, mingles. Shingles was not a terminal or dangerous disease. It was caused by stress or fatigue, a reawakening of a chicken pox virus living in the bloodstream infecting the nervous system. It was a simple and common virus, the nurse explained. The lesions and the pain would vanish in two weeks.
My father, lying on the tissue-covered bed with his hand over his heart, helplessly repeated to the nurse, “I’m so scared for tonight. It’s so painful, so very painful. How can I sleep?”
I listened carefully to my father as I sat on the plastic chair next to the stainless-steel sink underneath a box of rubber gloves that hung from the wall. Under my breath, I was urging him in Korean to tell the nurse about his father’s death. Tell her everything. Tell her what an asshole he was. The shingles was caused by the news of his father’s death. Instead, my father was asking the nurse if he could be operated on to get rid of the awful pain. She said an operation was unnecessary, and he would be given a prescription for painkillers.
I wanted to hear him say, “It is so painful, so very painful. I am scared for tonight. I cannot sleep. You see, my father has died, and I cannot get myself to do the right thing, which is to go to Korea, which is to go to his funeral. My father has died. All day long, I have been hearing his voice in my ears. His voice rings in my ears. My father’s last words to me were spoken on the telephone. He told me to have a good life. The way you Americans say it to people you don’t e
ver want to see for the rest of your life. He told me to have a good life. I will not go to his funeral. I have no excuse. The only thing that keeps me here in America like a coward is hatred. You see, I hate my father because when I was a boy, he sent me into the fields to work while my brothers were sent to school. They all live well in Korea. He beat me. He would not buy me shoes. He would not let me eat eggs, which he said were too good for me. It was because of him that my sister is living in a Buddhist temple, a little crazy in the head, that my blood mother is living alone in a village, very much crazy in the head. On my wedding day, he struck me across my ear so hard that when I was walking down the aisle to meet my bride, my ears were ringing. I could not hear the music. I could not hear her vows. She is no longer with us. She took my son and returned to Korea. I ran away to America because of my father. He was so bad to me. I do not know why. I do not understand. And now, now, now, my father is dead. It is so painful. I am scared of tonight because the pain will be most agonizing in the night on my bed when my clock blinks two fifty-five.”
