Happy Birthday or Whatever

by Annie Choi

  I looked for the tag. “How do you know? There’s no price.”

  “Because it Veh-sahch-ee. Not have price because people who buy not care price. They see ugly shirt—oh Mommy can’t believe how ugly—and they see name and they buy even if three hundred dollar and they can—”

  “THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS?”

  It was the first time I had heard of such a thing, spending a large sum on such a revolting shirt, something made out of curtains pillaged from a yacht. Until that moment, I had assumed that hideous clothes cost nothing, because that is what I wore and that is how much they cost.

  Even though my mother had refined taste, she did not use it when she dressed me. Instead, she dressed me the way my aunts dressed their children. Exactly like them. As in, I wore all their old clothes, which would’ve been fine had they just been normal. Because I was the youngest and smallest of all my cousins, my closet was the last stop on a hand-me-down’s journey through time and two continents.

  The odyssey would begin in Seoul, where my aunt would buy a new sweater for her twins Jung-ah and Jung-yun. In the beginning, they probably fought over the sweater, wanting to be the first to wear it. Then after a year, when the novelty had worn off, they most likely mashed it into the back of a drawer along with their mismatched socks. Eventually the twins would unload the crumpled sweater on Yoon-chong. As the artist in the family, Yoon-chong probably modified the sweater, adding ribbons or pins, and she would wear it often, only to outgrow it and pass it to her younger sister. Yoonmi, as the free-spirited dancer in the family, probably ripped off the ribbons to put them in her hair and used the sweater as a jump rope until the stitches barely held together. Now the sweater, by this point faded and stretched to fit over the changing bodies of four girls, would migrate across the Pacific Ocean to Tina in Los Angeles. The shipping alone would’ve cost more than a dozen new sweaters, but my family has never understood cost efficiency. At the command of her mother, Tina would wear the sweater until her arms outgrew the sleeves and the cuffs no longer covered her watch. By the time I got the sweater, it would stink of dried fish and mothballs, and have several stains—pickled cabbage, soy sauce, mustard, chocolate. There would be a series of holes in each armpit and the hem would unravel at the slightest movement. But these would be the least of its problems. Even after my mother would dry clean and mend the sweater, it wouldn’t be suitable for wearing. It wouldn’t even be suitable to line the bottom of my rabbit’s cage. No amount of chemical solvents and thread could repair a sweater that was hopelessly out of style. Still, my mother would force me to wear it anyway.

  According to my mother’s rationale, it would be wasteful and disrespectful to not wear these clothes after they traveled so far to get to me. Hand-me-down clothing was a way to keep in touch with our family in Korea, to hold on to the people we rarely saw. I’m sure my mother realized how atrocious these hand-me-downs were, but she figured that if these clothes were good enough for my Korean cousins, they were good enough for American me. She figured wrong.

  At one point in Korea, any kind of English writing was cool when it appeared on clothes. When I was six, I received a gold, nylon vest printed with the words “The fun of soup bring Spring.” My mother didn’t know what it meant, and neither did I, but she did know that my cousins were hip, so if I wore their clothes I’d be hip too, a kind of secondhand coolness. This vest also had matching nylon pants with the same phrase printed along the entire side of one leg. The shoop-shoop sound the pants made every time I moved was a constant warning to all that could hear and read that I was an undeniable loser. As I was learning how to read, I discovered what nonsense I was wearing, and when I could read, my classmates could read.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I dunno.”

  “You think soup is fun?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Soup’s not fun, it’s boring. You like soup, so you’re boring. Ha, ha, ha, Annie Fannie Choi-boy likes soup! Chinese, Japanese, Indian chief!”

  I went home and cried to my mother.

  “Why you cry? You clothes match, see? Top and bottom go together. Everything match! It very nice set, Anne. It fashion in Korea!”

  “But I’m not in Korea!”

  “Anne, I tell you, if you in Korea, everyone say you look like model!”

  “But I’m not in Korea! Everyone makes fun of me.”

  “Then tell them you model in Korea and they bad kid. Very bad. And they make they mommy such shame.”

  Another problem was that all the clothes I got were about a decade behind the current trend in Korea, which was yet another decade behind America in fashion. So according to my calculations, the hand-me-downs I was forced to wear in 1986, were actually from 1976, but looked like they were from 1966. So in the 80s when most of the kids were wearing neon-pink, peg-legged jeans, I was wearing dirt-brown bell-bottoms. When girls were wearing long, belted tops that fell off of one shoulder, I was wearing checkered polyester pant suits.

  Then there were clothes that looked over two hundred years outdated. One of my mother’s favorite outfits she forced me to wear was a pair of bright green knickerbockers and a white blouse with an unruly amount of lace ruffles at the collar and cuffs. It was an ensemble appropriate for Paul Revere’s stable boy, and the first time my mother laid the outfit on my bed before school, I felt she had stopped loving me.

  “NO, NO, NO! It’s ugly, I hate it. I don’t want to wear it.”

  “No, Anne, it cute. Mommy like it very much.”

  “Then you wear it!”

  “ANNE!”

  “I said, I don’t want to wear it!”

  “You have to wear, I make you wear.”

  “I want to wear something else. THIS IS UGLY!”

  “Anne, shhh, everyone like it. You teacher say ‘Oh Anne you so pretty today I wish I had same clothes!’”

  She shoved me into the car, with my frilly blouse and knickerbockers soaked with tears. She assured me that I would be the center of attention, and she was right. My eight-year-old classmates stared until their eyeballs popped out of their heads and even my teacher looked confused. Miss Jensen didn’t know how to tell me that the American Revolution was over.

  Another one of my most memorable garments was a heavy wool, dark brown dress with a white lace collar and an oversized velvet bow. The dress came nearly to my ankles and looked as if it belonged in The Little House on the Prairie—all it needed was a bonnet and Michael Landon. My mother found this outfit so adorable that she forced me to wear it in the summer. On a 110-degree Southern California afternoon, the wool dress was not appropriate. I itched. I sweat. I cried. Then I took it off when she wasn’t looking. Once this was at the grocery store. The ice cream SECTION OF OUR GROCER’S FREEZER WAS JUST BEGGING ME TO STRIP.

  “ANNE! What happen to you dress?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “WHERE IS DRESS?”

  “It’s too hot, it’s too itchy. I hate it.”

  “YOU PUT DRESS ON NOW. YOU RUN IN STORE NAKED. I SO EMBARRASS. YOU MAKE MOMMY VERY MAD!”

  My mother, so dramatic—It’s not like I was naked. I started wearing an undershirt and shorts underneath the dress in order to minimize the contact between my skin and that itchy, burlap sack. This probably contributed greatly to my overheating, but choosing between a heat stroke and a rash was not easy.

  When I turned nine years old, I started picking out my own clothes for school, and I salvaged a few articles that were possible to wear without being stoned by classmates. After years of negative reinforcement, I had figured out which clothing was acceptable. Miraculously, Tina had passed on a pair of plain, white pants, and I was finally making friends. These white pants were unobjectionable, unlike the red and white polka-dotted square-dancing dress with the fifty-pound pink petticoat (“But you love pink color!”). My mother and I started shopping to buy clothes to supplement the ones from my cousins. Everything I pic
ked out in the store was a solid color—white, beige, gray, black. The wide-legged, paisley jumpsuit didn’t look so bad after a blue jacket covered half of it up. At last, pants and shirts and dresses, absent of extra zippers and large buttons that served no purpose, made me feel at peace.

  When I started middle school, the trickle down of clothes from my older cousins finally stopped. They had all gotten their growth spurts, and their broad shoulders cruised at a higher altitude than mine. By twelve years old, I still measured less than five feet tall and weighed well under a buck. But even though I looked more like an eight-year-old than an eighth grader, my mother decided that it was time to dress like a sophisticated lady like herself.

  “What you think this skirt, Anne you like? It tweed.”

  “Ugh, Mom, It’s like totally itchy. OH MY GOSH, it has a matching jacket TOO?”

  That woman pushed tweed suits like a drug. At the junior’s department at Robinson’s, my mother could sniff out tweed in a rack full of cotton separates. She didn’t understand that most junior-high girls just wanted to fit in, which meant looking like other junior-high girls, not Jackie O. or a basement couch.

  “OK, ok you not like it. How about this, you like?” She held up another skirt.

  “Mom, that’s tweed too. Stop it. You’re totally embarrassing me!”

  By twelve years old, I had developed my own sense of style, which was to lack it. I wore nothing that would call attention to myself. I refused to follow any trends—I was afraid I would follow them incorrectly or at the wrong time. I had spent enough time under the scrutiny of my peers, and I just wanted to remain under the radar. No more confusing translations displayed proudly on sweatshirts, no more anachronistic clothing, no more jumpsuits.

  “Anne you look so boring. You wear same thing every day, shirt and pants and tennis shoe. I fall sleepy when I look at you.”

  “What are you talking about? How about this?” I picked a shirt off the sales rack.

  “Anne that has no style.”

  “Sure it does, it’s black and has a collar. Pretty stylish right?”

  “Oh, my only daughter look like boy! I think maybe I die!”

  Shopping had become an exhausting, exasperating routine for us. She wanted me to dress with finesse, to be a fashion-minded daughter of a fashion-minded mother. It was important that I looked good now that I was older, partly because it reflected on her parenting skills. Daughters who are stylish are organized, obedient, and Ivy League-bound. Daughters who look like boys are indolent, rude, and start fires at school.

  “Anne, why you not wear dress?” She held up a yellow dress with a lace skirt.

  “Because I don’t want to wear an ugly dress.”

  “What you mean? Dress is pretty!”

  “No it isn’t. It looks like a tablecloth. There are so many dresses here, and they are all like totally ugly.”

  She held up a flower-print dress, which I deemed childish. She held up a black dress, which I called depressing. She held up a white lace dress.

  “You’re kidding, right? Am I getting married?”

  “Anne, I think no one marry you. You have so much excuse! You make Mommy life very hard.” She held up a simple, blue T-shirt.

  “Oh nice, I like the pocket.”

  She rolled her eyes and took out her wallet. Even if she bought me a tweed suit or a wedding dress, there was no way I would wear it to school, or anywhere else for that matter. I was too old for her to dress me, and she was too tired to argue with me about clothes.

  In high school, a petite button-nosed girl named Alyson Spilker introduced me to vintage stores. Alyson had blue hair, a nose ring, and a quirky sense of style that I admired. She wore outlandish pants, colorful hats, and big silver boots. She made her own shirts out of tights and created her own jewelry from wires and beads. Alyson was charismatic and charming, and as we became closer, Aardvark’s Odd Ark and Hidden Treasures replaced my mother’s cavernous, cloned department stores. I discovered that shopping could actually be pleasant, and I realized that used clothing from other people—as long as they weren’t my cousins—could actually look good. Alyson and I would paw through dusty clothes, and she would always find the most misshapen dress or the most chaotic sweater in the store and laugh.

  “Oh my God, can you even imagine wearing this?” She held up a purple sweater-dress. “It’s like someone was knitting a sweater and said, hey, I wonder what’ll happen if I just keep going?”

  “I’ve worn worse things.”

  Through Alyson, I developed a style of my own—sequined sweaters from the fifties, geometric scarves from the sixties, coats from the seventies, and select pieces from the eighties. Hiding in plain shirts, pants, and tennis shoes wasn’t necessary as I gained more confidence. I never wore anything too eccentric, only clothes with just enough inventiveness to make me feel comfortable and noticed without feeling out of place. The clothes were unique and affordable—sophistication at a sensible price. I guess I did learn a little from my mother.

  “Anne, why you always wear old clothes? Why not buy new?”

  “Because the old stuff is cool.”

  “But it old, you look like homeless!”

  “No, I don’t. Homeless people wear trash bags.”

  I foraged in my mother’s deep closets for her old clothes, finding blazers with patches on the elbows, macramé belts, and printed blouses with long sleeves that I had my grandmother shorten so they’d fit better. I found daring mini-skirts, fuzzy cardigans, and even a leather trench coat with a faux fur collar.

  “I don’t like you clothes, Anne. We go shopping more. You look so silly.”

  “But these are your clothes. So are you saying that you look silly?”

  “Anne, I tell you, I wear those many, many year ago. Before you born and give me headache.”

  “Then why did you keep them around?”

  “I don’t know. I should have throw away but I think so much waste.”

  “OK, so now I’m not wasting them, what’s the big deal.”

  “Big deal? You look silly—that big deal. People think ‘Oh Annie mommy not dress her only daughter so Annie have to find old clothes.’”

  “They so totally do not think that. They think, ‘Oh Annie’s so cool. Look at her awesome clothes. I wish I was wearing that.’”

  My mother couldn’t help smiling. It is a strange compliment, that someone could appreciate the sense of style you had decades past instead of the one you had at the moment. But fashion changes, and as trite as it may sound, people change, too. And people’s fashions change. And sometimes this leads to crimes of fashion.

  When I started college, my mother started golfing. With no kids in the house to obsess over, she quickly settled into a routine. Every morning, she practiced at the range with friends from church, and got lessons from a pro every Thursday. At least three times a week she played eighteen holes, sometimes thirty-six if she could squeeze it into her day. Within three months, she bought a set of titanium clubs and high-end golf balls designed to fly to the moon. Then she enrolled in a country club. She would call me on the phone each week to talk about the newest trends in putters or the latest improvements to golf cleats, and I’d sigh loudly hoping she’d realize she was boring me. Like fashion, golfing was something that put her in a special group, but to this I just couldn’t relate. I thought golfing was for people who were so wealthy that they had nothing better to do than chase a little white ball over some hills. Golfing was for the rich and white. My mother was neither. Her golf clubs were on layaway and her first country club was right next to the 101-freeway—large nets prevented balls from smashing through windshields. To my mother, golfing was the next step up. Her stylish clothes made her look sophisticated and wealthy, but being good at golf was a way to act sophisticated and wealthy. Plus, many of her church friends golfed. She needed to keep up.

  The first Thanksgiving after starting college, I returned home and noticed a few awards on the shelves. In just a few months, my m
other had become quite a decorated golfer—there were a certificate of participation for a church golf tournament, a Booby prize for the worst but most spirited player, and an award for Longest Drive. Her awards were next to me and my brother’s high school diplomas, a trophy Mike got in Boy Scouts, and a plaque awarded to my father by his company for his dedication and commitment to excellence.

  “What did you do with my fourth-grade photo?”

  “Oh I put away to make room for Mommy trophy.” She waved her hands casually.

  “What? Why would you do that—whoa, what happened to your hand?”

  One of my mother’s hands was golden brown. The other was pasty white.

  “I wear my golf glove on this hand.”

  “It looks like you’re still wearing the glove. It’s freaky.”

  “What mean freaky?”

  “You know, like scary.”

  “You scare? I scare too. I scare that my only daughter look like homeless.” She looked over my outfit and recoiled. I was wearing a vintage leather blazer, a light blue tuxedo shirt, and jeans.

  “Whatever. Why don’t you wear sunblock?”

  My mother grinned and proudly showed me her shirt tan. A perfect line circled each bicep, marking a border between her bronze arms and her pale shoulders. It was the most shocking farmer’s tan I had ever seen, but there was something much more shocking—her outfit. She was wearing blue and green plaid Bermuda shorts with a red and yellow plaid collared shirt. On her tousled head was a terrycloth visor with plaid trim, also clashing. She was a confusing map of horizontal and vertical lines, in more colors that should be worn on one person. Her thick white socks had gigantic pom-poms on the back, which prevented the socks from slipping into her golf cleats. Her feet looked like she had stepped inside two cottontail bunnies. Her outfit was worse than The Little House on the Prairie throwback dress and more ridiculous than the Paul Revere ensemble. But not worse than the “Fun of Soup Bring Spring.”