Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  It got worse. “Who’s gonna kiss you?” a few kids chanted one day outside class. They took a show of hands. When Curtis raised his hand I started to smile, but then everybody laughed like it was a joke, and Curtis laughed with them. I was embarrassed to open my mouth with all the metal sticking out like wiring.

  After that, Allison and Heather started turning away a little when I played with them, as if I wasn’t really in their group. They organized a game of the Blob without me, and when we played they didn’t try to catch me. I was the last person to be caught, but I knew it was nothing to be proud of.

  Halloween was my favorite American holiday, but that year I went to school without a costume. “Only babies wear costumes to school,” Allison said.

  Heather agreed. “We should wait for trick-or-treating.”

  So on Halloween, as we stood outside the school waiting for the morning bell to ring, Curtis came up to me. He was wearing a blue robe and a pointy hat. “I guess you didn’t wear a costume,” he said.

  I tried to smile back, but the insides of my lips scraped against the braces, and I kept my mouth closed. Then Curtis’s friend Greg came toward us. He put on a mask, snapping the elastic behind his head. The mask was a great ugly face of a bucktoothed man with narrow slits for eyes.

  “I’m Janie’s boyfriend,” Greg said. Curtis looked at me, then Greg, and laughed.

  My father had seen this costume at the grocery store a couple of weeks ago and had wanted to complain. My mother had held him back and said, “Please.”

  “It’s wrong,” my father said.

  “Don’t cause trouble,” my mother said.

  I’d read what it said on the package: “Chinaman Costume.” My parents had already started walking away. As they walked, they bent their heads together angrily, forming a wall that shut us out. Hannah chattered along beside me, but I hushed her up and tried to listen.

  “Haven’t you learned anything?” my mother said. “If you have to cause trouble, we can go back to Korea where at least if something happens to you, we have family to help us.” She stopped walking and faced him. She took a breath. “I want to go back,” she said, as if she’d been waiting a long time to say it.

  My father flinched, but did not seem surprised. “I have a job here,” he said.

  “We live in a place that sells Chinaman costumes.” Her voice shook. I didn’t know why she cared so much. We weren’t even Chinese. “I want to leave.”

  “We’re here now, and we can’t just pack up and go,” my father said. “I have this family to support.”

  “If you care so much about our well-being, then act like it,” my mother hissed.

  My father reached for her arm, but she wrenched away, and left us standing there, at the edge of the produce aisle.

  My father stood, fixed in place behind the shopping cart. I tugged at his hand. “Daddy,” I said. “Could we really go back?”

  He smiled down at me. “I thought you liked it here,” he said. “I thought you said it was better than Korea.”

  He’d been so angry when I’d said that. I didn’t feel it was fair to use it against me now. It was cheating.

  “Please?” I said. “Daddy?”

  My father pulled his hand out of mine and rubbed his face.

  In the meantime Hannah had run after my mother, and was trying to hug her around the waist. My mother pushed Hannah away impatiently.

  “Never mind,” I said quickly, reaching for my father’s hand. “It’s all right. We can stay.”

  My father looked down at me and smiled. Suddenly he drew himself up straighter and bounced once on his heels. He took my hand and growled a little, like a tiger, waving my hand. I growled back. We were tough.

  And now in the schoolyard Greg was wearing the Chinaman costume. He said, “Don’t you want to kiss your boyfriend?” He waggled his tongue at me from the hole in the mask between his buckteeth. Everyone was watching. I could feel their eyes on me, including Allison’s and Heather’s, waiting. I knew something had changed: I knew I had to say something in response to change it back. But I could think of nothing. Then the morning bell rang, and Mrs. Yates let us in. “Oh, what great costumes!” she said, as we filed by.

  That night I waited for Allison and Heather to come to my house. Hannah left with her friends, a little band of witches and bunnies, bumping their pumpkin baskets excitedly against their knees. I was dressed as a bunch of grapes: I had spent three hours pinning the balloons onto my all-green clothes, and had painted my face purple. But Allison and Heather never came.

  The next day I didn’t try to talk to either of them. At recess I went by myself to the edge of the schoolyard and searched for late-blooming flowers to braid into a wreath. My mother had taught me how to make them, and I had taught Allison and Heather, and then we had agreed to keep the method a secret after we saw how the other girls wanted to learn, and how our knowledge made us separate. As I linked the flowers together I wondered who I would be friends with now, what I could offer that anyone might want. I didn’t mind being alone: it wasn’t that. It was the humiliation that bothered me: that I had been singled out as the one to make fun of and pick on. I didn’t know if there was any recovering from that.

  I looked up to scan the schoolyard, to see what everyone was doing. A group of my classmates had gathered, and they were slowly making their way toward me. They were between me and the school, and when I saw them coming I started heading back to the main building, trying to loop out so I could avoid them, but they spread and caught me easily. They formed a semicircle around me. Everyone was there. My entire class.

  I stood there and faced them, and in my head I told myself to think of Queen Min, who had been the hero of the girls in my grade school in Korea. We’d learned that she’d been torn apart by Japanese soldiers when she refused to accept Japan’s occupation of Korea. In response they’d hacked her to pieces, and then although she’d kept her legs closed, they’d pried her open and hacked her to pieces there as well. They’d lit her on fire twice. I told myself now that to Queen Min, this would be nothing. I pretended my classmates were Japanese soldiers, and I was a queen, and I stood there and looked at them without flinching. To stay detached like this seemed like its own kind of power.

  “Does Janie have no one to play with?” Erin said. “Did she come out here to cry?”

  “I’m not crying,” I said. I stared at her so she could see for herself. Allison and Heather were standing next to her, and Allison looked away when I tried to make eye contact.

  Allison and Heather had stickers of scorpions stuck to their right hands. They weren’t wearing their friendship bracelets. I was still wearing mine. “Why are you doing this?” I asked. Neither of them replied.

  Greg asked, “Who did you go trick-or-treating with last night?”

  “I went with my mom,” I said. I knew the moment I said it that it was a mistake. Heather snorted. My classmates laughed.

  “You should have called,” I said to Allison. “You said I was your best friend.” I hated myself for saying that. It sounded like begging. Allison flinched, though, and avoided the furtive, hurt glance Heather shot at her.

  “It’s not true,” Allison said. “I never said that.”

  Erin stepped forward. She reached out and pushed my face with the palm of her hand, hard, so it hurt. “Look at Janie’s face,” she said. “It’s as flat as paper.”

  My classmates laughed. “Why don’t you go back to Japan with the rest of the robots?” Erin continued. She knew I wasn’t from Japan.

  “Why don’t you go back to jail where your father is?” I said.

  Erin gasped. Her face screwed up tight and small, and she reached her arm back. When she swung, I caught her right arm and then her left. I held her arms back as she tried to hit me again. I remembered the story she’d told about her father and how the Chinese man had yelled, “Ching chong ching chong,” and for no reason I could think of, I yelled this at her as loud as I could.

  “Ching ch
ong,” I screamed. “Ching chong ching chong ching chong.” When I saw the fear in her face, I laughed.

  “Let me go,” she yelled. She started to cry.

  “Let her go,” someone said from the group. I looked up to see who had spoken and saw the faces of all my classmates watching me, appalled.

  Then the short bell rang, announcing the end of recess. I shoved Erin away, rushed past the kids who surrounded me, and ran. I wanted to get away from them all, to run past the school and into the woods, and I wanted to keep running until I got home. I wished I was big enough, giant, to scoop up my parents and Hannah and to keep on running until the kids and the school were far behind me.

  Behind me, Greg yelled, “Get her!” I pumped my legs faster and faster, past the trees, then the wide lawn of the field, and I was on the sidewalk. I was exhilarated: I was faster than them. If I could push my legs a little harder, I would be able to lift off the ground and fly away until the school was only the tiniest speck. If I could make it to the bench outside our classroom, I would be safe.

  I looked behind me. Only Allison was close. It felt good to run. I almost forgot I was being chased. I almost laughed. They were still yelling, “Catch her!” The bench was there, sitting calmly against the wall, only a few steps away. I began to slow down.

  And then I felt Allison’s hand between my shoulders. My head snapped back, and I fell forward. I couldn’t stop. I threw my hands up to block the wall, but it was coming too fast, and I felt my palms tear as they hit the brick. My head bounced when it hit the wall. I lost my body. The sun flickered. The world wobbled. The next thing I saw was someone’s shoe, and then Greg’s blurry face peering down at me.

  I sat up. My hands rose to my face. Blood spilled into them, filling my hands and dripping onto the ground. There were little white pieces like pebbles, like sand, floating in the blood, and I cupped my hands together, trying to keep the pieces from washing out.

  I am not going to cry, an urgent voice said from inside my head. Don’t cry. The voice startled me. It seemed completely separate from me.

  Someone’s hand gripped my arm. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” a woman’s voice said, with authority. I didn’t know who she was, this adult who had appeared from out of nowhere, but I felt my legs pushing themselves up in response, and in my head, the voice ordered again, Don’t cry. But just beneath my stomach I felt a wail beginning to rise like a wind, and to my shame it rose and rose, apart from me.

  The woman kept a firm grip on my shoulder, and walking me into the school, said, “Let’s go.”

  Then I sat in the principal’s office for an hour, bleeding slowly into a box of Kleenex until the secretary came back from her lunch break and called my mother.

  “The first thing she needs is a dentist,” the secretary said when my mother walked into the office.

  My mother looked at me, checked herself mid-step, and nodded. She walked past me to have a brief conversation with the secretary, and thanked her for watching over me. Then she very calmly took me by the hand, and led me out of the school and into the parking lot. There, she knelt and looked at my face; she reached out and touched my cheek, softly, softly. Her face was quite still as her fingertips ran down my cheek. She was smiling, as if nothing so terrible had happened, as if everything was all right. I felt such a rush of relief then that I began to cry.

  My mother leaned forward and held me, kneeling in the gravel. When I finally stopped, she pulled away and touched my face again, still smiling that same beautiful smile, and I thought in that moment that things would be okay. We got in the car, and she drove us straight to the dentist. She did not ask me then, or ever, what had happened.

  I couldn’t feel anything. Everything had gone numb. It was Dr. Stanley’s day off, so he had to open his office to handle my case. Darlene, the hygienist, held my hand. She was beautiful, with long blond hair, and she looked like a beauty queen, like no one I’d ever met before. When Hannah had first seen her she’d asked if she was the tooth fairy. Now, I squeezed her cool hand shyly. Darlene told me that once when she was little, she had knocked three of her teeth clear out of her mouth. She smiled; with her left hand she pointed at them: they were perfect. “See? If they could fix me, they can fix you,” she said.

  For a moment I almost believed her. But when I looked in the mirror Darlene gave me, I almost dropped it, the face looking back was so unfamiliar. There was a lump on my forehead and my lips were too big. Everything was muddy black. When I opened my mouth, wires stuck out of my shredded gums: my front teeth had disappeared.

  Dr. Stanley came by, then, and I lay back and let him work on me. “Don’t spit for the next few days,” he said, as he finished. “Or you might end up spitting teeth.” My teeth had been knocked back up into my head. That was why I couldn’t see them. It was better to leave them there, he said, to work themselves down on their own. We would have to wait and see.

  Back at home I held ice packs to my face and felt like a hero. I hadn’t done anything brave, but as my parents fussed over me, I was aware that I was precious to them. Hannah watched us and whimpered. I let her crawl into my lap.

  Just before bedtime, I began to throw up, and that knocked loose a tooth that had been crammed halfway up my gums. It fell suddenly and hung, crippled and dangling. When I felt it, loose as a string, my mind went very quiet. I was calm when I went to my parents to show them, my mouth dribbling blood and puke. They took one look at me and got straight out of bed.

  We dropped Hannah off at Mrs. Chong’s house on our way to the hospital. She was the only other Asian in our town, and sometimes she watched us when my parents were busy. Her furniture was covered with thick, uncomfortable plastic, and she liked to give us her children’s old games to play with, dilapidated and always missing some crucial piece.

  “I don’t want to,” Hannah wailed, clinging to me in the car when my parents came to take her out, but my parents were firm, and she was pulled out and handed over, screaming.

  At the hospital, the doctor was brusque. “Why didn’t you bring her in right away?” he asked. My mother started to answer, but he waved her off. “We’re going to have to run some tests and take some X-rays,” he said. “Head injuries are very dangerous.” He said this angrily, and then turned to me, taking three quick steps forward so that he stood between my parents and me. When he looked at me, though, his face was soft, the anger tucked away.

  “Are you ready for some scans, kiddo?” he asked, his voice totally different.

  I nodded, and the movement made the room whirl.

  “Come with me, then,” he said. “We’ll bring you back to your parents in a little bit.”

  “Okay,” I said, and for whatever reason, I wasn’t nervous. I followed him.

  He took my hand and led me to another room where a nurse helped me change into a paper dress that opened in the back. It reminded me of the paper dolls I used to play with, of the dresses my mother had cut out of colored paper. After I was dressed, the nurse took me into a bright room where she told me to lie down on a belt that would feed me into a tunnel. “You’re going to hang out in a machine,” the doctor said. “It won’t hurt, so don’t worry; it’s just something that will make sure you’re a-okay. You won’t feel a thing.”

  I nodded.

  “You can close your eyes, but don’t sleep,” he said. “Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes.”

  He patted me gently on the cheek, with the tips of his fingers, like he thought it might hurt me to be touched.

  From the outside, the scanner looked like a tunnel glowing spooky blue from within. It was something out of television or outer space. The belt pulled me slowly along, and as I was fed into the open mouth of the cone, I thought how I would tell everyone about the way I entered the machine. I was in a cocoon of light. I was held in a cocoon of blue light, I would say. I could imagine their disbelief, their envy. No really, I was.

  Then I realized with a dim shock that there was no one to tell. With all the ligh
t moving through me I felt invisible. It was warm in there, and the blue glow steeped into my skin. I imagined I was disappearing. I thought of my parents, waiting somewhere outside. I thought of Hannah sitting on Mrs. Chong’s plastic sofa. When I closed my eyes, the light leaked through my eyelids. Even the dark was soft and blue. I imagined my parents, pale and green under the fluorescent lights, clattering on the cold linoleum of the hospital. I felt warm and safe, and I imagined I was being transported. I was being beamed up to my home planet. On my home planet, everything that had been broken would be healed. I would emerge whole, my face and teeth intact.

  Afterward, the doctor told us I had a concussion from the accident that would keep me dizzy for the next couple of days. My brain had bounced and bruised itself against my skull. He showed us the X-rays, pointed to the fissures in the bones of my face. Then he looked at my parents. “Could I have a moment alone with the patient?” he said.

  I expected them to protest, but the nurse opened the door to usher them out, and they left. As soon as the door shut behind them, the doctor turned to me. “What exactly happened?” he asked.

  “A girl pushed me,” I said, wondering if I was in trouble. I wondered if my parents had been taken to the waiting room, or if they were just outside the door. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” he said, leaning forward. “What I want to know, Janie, is how another little girl could push you so hard that you got hurt this badly.”

  “It was an accident,” I said, feeling strangely flattered that he’d remembered my name.

  The doctor shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “Look,” he said. He lifted his chart and tapped it. “Do you get hurt like this often?”

  I thought of scraped elbows and knees, and the time playing tag when I had slid four feet in gravel and scraped all the skin off my butt. Treacherously, I thought of Hannah and the pitcher of glass she had dropped on my foot. I thought of my parents making us pick branches from the backyard to switch us with when we misbehaved. I stopped abruptly.