by Annie Choi
“NOT EVEN. You CANNOT put this thing up. It’s horrible. And it’s heavy. It’s gonna tear the wall down.”
“No, no, we can put up.”
“But it’s gonna scare everyone.”
“Anne, stop.”
“Jesus Christ, just look at it!”
“Anne! You mouth!”
My mother’s eyes burned right through me. She walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway, scanning walls and assessing lighting options. I followed closely behind. She stopped and gazed at an empty space between two windows.
“No, you can’t put it there, there’s not enough space.”
She brushed me aside and pulled out a tape measure. Luckily, I was right. The picture was too wide.
“How about in the closet?”
“Anne, stop, I get very mad.”
“Ok, fine, how about behind the door in the closet?”
She ignored me and walked into the den. She looked curiously at a large photograph of Mike and me when we were little; we were standing in front of a waterfall on Jeju, an island off the Korean peninsula. I was wearing a white ruffled blouse with puffy sleeves and pants so pink they looked like I had gone wading in a pool of Pepto-Bismol. My brother’s green collared shirt hung on for dear life around his protruding belly and his striped tube socks were pulled up to his pudgy knees. We were both grinning at my father behind the camera; I had small white nubs for front teeth.
“Wait, you’re going to take down that picture for HIM? You don’t even KNOW him.”
“Anne, I think you talk too much.”
“You are not allowed to touch that picture.”
“Anne, go away.”
“MOM, YOU CAN’T PUT IT THERE!”
“OK. OK, ayoo.”
She growled and walked toward the front door. She stood pensively in front of a large, empty wall.
“Oh no way. Not here.”
“No, it good, Mommy like here. Shh, why you not be quiet, Anne?”
“But it’s too close to the front door!”
“So?”
“So? So people will SEE IT.”
She reached for her tape measure. I plastered myself against the wall and stretched out my arms so she couldn’t measure.
“Anne, you move, NOW.”
“No, this isn’t right! I can’t let you do this. You’re gonna have to kill me first.”
My mother stormed away and yelled for my father. He promptly showed up with a toolbox and a stepstool. My heart sank but I stood steadfast against the wall.
“Dad, please don’t do this to us.”
“Annie, you have to move.”
“Why don’t you put it in your bedroom?”
“Because Mommy want put picture here.”
“I’m sure it’d be OK if you hung it in your bedroom.”
“I don’t want it in the bedroom.”
“Well I don’t want it next to the front door.”
“Annie, move out of the way. I’m sorry, but you lose.”
“We all lose.”
He peeled me off the wall, set down the step stool, and plugged in his drill. Using museum-grade wall anchors and four-inch nails, my father hung up the picture. I stared at him in disbelief; he was aiding and abetting poor taste, a sin really.
“But don’t you think it’s a little too big, like maybe just a little over the top?”
My father sighed and looked down at me from the step stool. “I think it fine. Be nice to you mommy. You both yell and scream, I get such headache, you know? I’m an old man and you make me older.”
A few hours later I heard the front door open, followed by a gurgling, choking noise and a deep-throated laugh. My brother had discovered the pale-faced stranger staring at him. I joined Mike in the foyer.
“Dude, is this some kind of joke?”
“I know, I know.” I shook my head.
“What the hell? It’s so huge. She’s totally lost her shit.”
We stood in front of the photograph, dumbfounded and oddly absorbed. The picture had a peculiar magnetism to it, like a piece of eye-torturing art or pornography. I wondered what kind of shoes John Paul II was wearing under those robes. What footwear possibly goes with papal garb? Dainty, soft-soled slippers? Italian leather dress shoes?
“Dude, why did you let her do this next to the front door?”
“How is this my fault? I tried to stop her. And, you know, it could be worse. It could be in your bedroom.”
He shuddered. “It doesn’t even go with the house.”
The picture hung near a long scroll of traditional Korean calligraphy and a blue vase painted with a scene from a fifteenth-century Korean countryside.
“Nothing goes with this. Except a church.”
“Well, can we take it down?”
We weighed the possibilities: my mother’s wrath (and, perhaps, God’s) for deposing the Pope or the constant abuse from friends for this jumbo JP2.
“I doubt it. Dad anchored it to the house. It’s never coming down.”
My friends’ reactions, upon seeing the Pope greet them at the door like a restaurant host, ranged from poorly stifled surprise (“WHOA, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”) to complete shock (dropped jaws, followed by awkward silence). One friend with a highly developed sense of irony was impressed (“Holy shit, where can I buy one?”). Since most of my mother’s friends were from her church, they fawned over the photograph, complimenting its beautiful frame and saying what a wonderful Pope he was and oh don’t you know he speaks eight languages and likes experimental theater and poetry and thank God he wasn’t assassinated, what a tragedy that could’ve been. My mother seemed quite pleased with herself and the oversized display of her faith.
For a long time, church was mostly a social outlet for my parents, especially my mother. They opened up their house for bible study groups and fund-raising meetings, during which they gossiped about other church members and their children (drugs, marriage, Harvard) instead of discussing the bible. My mother sang in the choir along with her three closest friends and chaired committees that organized picnics and holiday parties. When my brother and I were in elementary school, our parents dragged us to church even though the services were done in Korean, which we tried our best not to understand. My mother’s elbows kept jabbing us in the ribs to keep us awake in the pews and after Mass, we waited impatiently in the car for our parents to stop chatting with their friends. We honked the horn and blasted the radio while our parents tried to ignore us. Eventually the church added services in English, but Mike and I remained uninterested. Who cares about turning water into wine? At thirteen and ten years old, we were too old for magic; we wanted Nintendo. Mike and I usually left in the middle of Mass to go across the street to eat at Tommy’s Hamburgers. But even seasoned french fries weren’t enough motivation to leave the house on Sundays. Every Sunday morning my brother and I fought a two-front war; I would refuse to get into my church clothes and Mike would take sanctuary in the bathroom. Eventually our parents gave up on us. We’d have to find salvation on our own.
Before the Pope came to live in our house, we had a cross here and there, but the photograph took religion in our home to a whole new level. It showed me that, to my parents, being Catholic was no longer just about socializing and finding a community of Korean immigrants, but about having a relationship with God. As a fifteen-year-old, I wasn’t pleased about this. Being religious was uncool—I knew this from watching the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live—and I had my own opinions about abortion and contraception. I thought my parents had been doing just fine as laissez-faire Catholics, but now they were announcing their beliefs to the world, or at least to anyone who visited us. We didn’t need organized religion and we didn’t need John Paul II upsetting what was once a pleasant-looking foyer. But the picture was just the beginning.
Gold crosses started to appear on the kitchen and living room walls, and colorful rosaries emerged on every lamp in the house. Jesus candles and dishes painted with biblical scenes
materialized on the mantle. A wooden manger, complete with lambs and a baby Jesus, became the centerpiece of the living room table. Little statuettes of Jesus (on the cross and off) and pewter figurines of saints convened on sidetables. A picture of The Last Supper on petrified wood hung near the bathroom, not in the kitchen or dining room where one might have supper. A two-foot-tall ceramic Virgin Mary sprung up in the garden; she looked serene among the flowers and the jackrabbits that ate them. On top of the piano, my mother placed a framed prayer and a bust of Jesus, which I always turned toward the wall when I messed with the timer so I’d only practice for fifty minutes instead of an hour as my mother had instructed. Korean Catholic books, with covers picturing clouds and rays of sunshine or praying hands, sat next to her romance novels on the shelves, and they were all squeezed between matching Jesus and Virgin Mary bookends. An enormous three-foot-long rosary, with beads the size of baseballs, hung on the wall over the television. Our house was getting out of hand. There was nothing that could be done short of lighting it on fire.
“Mom, this is enough. You’re even ruining the bathroom.”
She had placed a framed copy of the poem “Footprints” between the soap dish and the toothbrush holder in my bathroom. The poem is about a man who reflects back on his life and sees two sets of footprints, a set that belongs to him and a set that belongs to Jesus. The man discovers that during the hardest parts of his life, he sees only one set of footprints. He gets angry because he thinks Jesus abandoned him. It turns out he was wrong: “During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.” That was in my bathroom, the least inspirational place in our house. “Ruin? Why ruin? I think nice.”
“Then put it in your bathroom.”
Etched on a mirror in blue type, the poem was not enlightening, but just one more thing I had to clean. It often got stained stubbornly with dried lather and toothpaste spit.
I’m not sure why my mother collected all this kitsch. Why does anyone collect anything? You buy one thing, it makes you happy. So you buy a hundred more. I see it all the time—my friend’s mother collects ceramic pigs, which may or may not be worse than my mother’s religious paraphernalia. It’s possible that my mother thought having more Catholic knickknacks made her more Catholic, although I have trouble believing that she attached deep spiritual meaning to a plastic Virgin Mary golf tee carrying case. All I know is that by the time I was seventeen, our house looked like a roadside Catholic gift shop.
During my senior year of high school, my mother and members from her church went on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina where the Virgin Mary allegedly appears and sends messages through six chosen people. It’s a site not officially recognized by the Catholic Church, but that really didn’t matter to my mother. She brought back a staggering number of statuettes. She unwrapped each one carefully and lined them up proudly on the kitchen counter. By this point I should’ve been accustomed to all my mother’s holy trinkets, but these statuettes both depressed and angered me. All the bric-a-brac littered around the house were eyesores and embarrassments, but visiting a war-torn country to see a ghost defied logic. She was in the same category of people who worshipped vegetables, mud stains, and cow pies that look like the baby Jesus.
“What’s this?” I pointed to an angel with wings outspread. He was wielding a menacing spear and stepping on the head of a man, who looked quite uncomfortable. In contrast, the angel looked very tranquil.
“It angel, so nice you think?”
“Why is he stepping on that guy’s head? Angels aren’t supposed to do that.”
“Because, that man was bad man.”
“What did he do?”
“Bad thing.”
I rolled my eyes and moved on to a wooden cross with a gold Jesus. “You bought another cross? We have like a million of them.”
“This one from church in Bosnia.”
“But it looks exactly like the one you got from downtown L.A.” I turned over the cross. “It says ‘Made in China.’”
“Really?”
“No.”
She smacked me on the shoulder. The cross ended up above the enormous photograph of the pontiff, which had once stood out in the Korean-ness of our home. Now it acted as the focal point that tied the house and all its Catholic kitsch together.
During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, most of my mother’s figurines broke, and the floor was strewn with pieces of Jesus, some of which cut into my bare feet when I ran to take cover. No one in the family was hurt and our house suffered no structural damage (just hairline fractures in the drywall and cracked floor tiles), but my mother agonized over her keepsakes. Many of the larger statuettes fell on top of the more delicate ones, pulverizing them into a powder. The Pope, however, clung resolutely to the wall. Not even a bit off center. The Pope survived a 6.7 shake in his usual mild manner, much to my disappointment. My mother tried to repair some of her figurines with glue, but it was difficult to figure out which bleeding heart and which praying hands belonged to which figurine. Unfortunately, the earthquake only gave her an excuse to buy more Catholic tchotchkes and within a year, my mother replaced all of her keepsakes and added more, including a plastic angel that doubled as a toothpick holder and a cross with a coat hook.
A few years ago my parents decided to downsize to a smaller house, and I returned to Los Angeles to help them pack. The first thing I did was turn my attention to the kitsch.
“Where are you gonna put all this crap?”
“You mouth so dirty, Anne.”
“The new house is smaller. There’s no room for any of this.” I held up a box of laminated Jesus and Mary trading cards with prayers printed on the back.
“I find room.”
“Mom, seriously, you have to throw this stuff out. Give it away.”
“No, no, I don’t think so.”
“You won’t even know it’s MISSING.”
I paused. I recalled all the stuffed animals my mother had doled out to those snotty Korean kids and my unwillingness to let them go, to surrender my beloved one by one. I remembered the time spent loving each one and the pants-wetting joy of getting another. And I could see how my mother thought my animals were multiplying beyond control and her concern over my obsession. I could see why she wanted to thin my herd.
But what came to mind wasn’t sympathy. It was payback.
I gleefully removed several plastic rosaries hanging from the lamps in the living room. Years of dangling near blazing light bulbs had melted the beads into blobs.
“I’m throwing these away.”
“No you can’t, Anne.”
“They’re melted. You have a thousand more.” I showed her the blobs and flung them into the trash. My mother winced. I held up a set of glass Jesus candles. “These are going, too. They’re done burning anyway.” I tossed them and they clinked together in the trashcan, like champagne glasses toasting. My mother reached into the trashcan and I swatted her hands away.
“ANNE!”
“Look, there’s no more wax in them. You can always buy more. I promise I’ll buy you another one.” I smirked. I looked around hungrily and grabbed a chipped plate depicting one of the Stations of the Cross.
“NO, ANNE, NO! SAVE!”
“OK, OK you can keep this one.” I set it aside. I picked up a clear plastic Jesus with a gold wire halo around his head. “What is this?” I threw it away. My mother opened her mouth to protest. I cut her off. “Listen, the new house is half the size of this one. Where are you going to put all of this?”
My mother shrugged. I had a point. Score one for Annie. With each dusty and chipped statuette I threw away, I thought of the stuffed animals my mother had given away when I was little. I was doing this for the koala in the Dodgers jersey, the white seal, the kitten. I relished the thud of the figurines in the trashcan and when they actually shattered or broke, I tried to hide my delight. Moving had never been this fun.
“No, Anne. St
op. Put in box and I save in garage. Don’t put all in trash! You understand?”
“Some of this has to be tossed.” I showed her a Precious Moments figurine of a praying child. Her leg was fractured—an earthquake injury probably.
“IN BOX, ANNE!”
I rolled my eyes and grabbed a box. I started adding my mother’s keepsakes: a few Jesus figurines, plastic saints and angels, Virgin Mary magnets, prints of nativity scenes, candles. One box led to another, much bigger box. Bookmarks with inspirational prayers, a chintzy Saint Christopher paperweight, a knicked plastic music box that played a flat hymn. When my mother wasn’t looking I deftly carried a few boxes to the trunk of my car. Three of them went to Aardvark’s Odd Ark, so that they could wind up in someone else’s house, and one box of items in disrepair went to my favorite charity, the trashcan.
But there was one more item. After fifteen years, it was time to detach JP2 from the wall, from my mother.
“There’s no way you are bringing this.”
“Anne, it Pope, yes I bring.”
“Where are you going to put it? There’s no room in the new house.”
“I make room.”
“You’re being totally unreasonable. There’s no place to put this. No wall space. Look how old this looks. We have tons of photographs to bring over. Of us.”
Little spots of mildew stained the white silk border. Fifteen years worth of dust sat on top of the frame, just out of reach from my mother’s rag. I found a gray moth that had crawled behind the picture to die.
“I have to bring. How I can throw like trash?”
“Well how about you give it away. I’m sure your friends wouldn’t mind taking in the Pope.”
“No, no one want.”
She was right. Who would want an old, oversized Pope? Not one of her friends; they probably had one in their houses anyway. It would have to be one of my friends.
“OK what if I told you my friend wanted it.”
“Who?”
“J.D. He’s Catholic. He loves the Pope.”
J.D. is Catholic and he does love the Pope. He has a Pope-Soap-on-a-Rope in his shower. He has a Pope-O-Scope, a kaleidoscope of the pontiff he fashioned out of a cardboard tube. He had decorated his house with Jesus candles and in his bathroom had installed a bleeding heart nightlight that cast a creepy red glow over the toilet. The first time he saw JP2 gracing my mother’s wall, he was nearly moved to tears of ecstasy. I didn’t even bother asking J.D. If he didn’t want it, the trash would gladly take it.
