Happy Birthday or Whatever

by Annie Choi

  “Well he thought Eunice was the most important girl.”

  “Filipino.” My mother added.

  “Yes, he thought Filipina Eunice was the most important girl. And now he thinks Julie is the most important girl.”

  “Chinese.”

  “Whatever. I heard that in other families, everyone meets boyfriends and girlfriends all the time.” I wasn’t sure why I was defending Andy—I didn’t really want to expose every boyfriend I’d ever have—but I think I was defending reason and common sense, two things my family could use, along with patience and a volume button. “Andy and Julie have been together for over two years. Maybe they’ll marry.”

  “Maybe they not marry,” my mother contended, “Who know? That why so confuse.”

  “But it’s not confusing!”

  “Anne, you not understand.” My father shook his head.

  “We only interest in one you marry,” my mother added.

  “Most important one,” my father echoed.

  “I know. I get it, but it’s not fair for you to get mad at Andy just because he brought a girlfriend to dinner. Don’t you care who he’s dating? Because you’re supposed to care.”

  “No, we care…. We just don’t want to know.” My mother adjusted her seatbelt so she could turn around even more and look me squarely in the eyes. “When you find husband, you tell us. Don’t bring home everyone you meet. Only bring one.”

  “Don’t be like Andy,” my father warned me.

  Throughout my life, my parents urged my brother and me to be more like Andy: be more studious like Andy; be better at sports like Andy; speak and write Korean and go to church every week like Andy. Now they were saying, just kidding, forget Andy. Don’t be like him.

  “OK, so you want me to tell you when I’ve found a husband, but I shouldn’t tell you who I’m dating? That’s confusing.”

  My mother rolled her eyes. “Why you ask so many question? I thought you say not confusing! Ayoo, I give up.” She looked at my father. He shrugged.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her in Korean, “she’ll figure it out. She’s smart. Someone will marry her.”

  “You think?” my mother asked him in Korean. They laughed.

  “I speak Korean, too, you know.”

  “You don’t speak Korean very good, Anne.” My mother smiled impishly.

  “You mean ‘I don’t speak Korean very well.’”

  “Ayoo, Anne, you never find husband because you cause so many problem.”

  “What did I do? I’m just sitting here. No problems here.”

  “No problem?” my mother asked, “So that mean you find husband? Where is he?” She looked around the car.

  “Why do I have to find the husband? Why doesn’t the husband find me instead?”

  “You need help? You know Dr. Kim’s son, Daniel, he orthodontist—”

  “MOM, STOP!”

  The car was silent. Finally.

  “I think Daniel engaged already,” my father whispered.

  “DAD!”

  “See, Anne? You run out of time!”

  My parents want the impossible. They want me to get married immediately, but to the “perfect” man who apparently is waiting for me to find him. Where do I even begin? Whenever I want to find anything, I consult a map, so I typed in “Annie’s husband” into Google Maps and surprisingly it came up with four pages of options, including a bed and breakfast in Springville, California; an outlet store in Lenox, Massachussets; and a nanny referral service in Mountain Village, Colorado. Sadly, none of these places deliver to New York, but it’s comforting to know you can find anything on the Internet. The pressure my parents put on me to find a husband makes me a bad girlfriend, but it’s not because I feel the need to get married in the next five minutes. In fact, I’m in no rush to get married. Unlike my parents, I can’t hear my b-clock ticking away. In fact, my clock could be in its final dark and lonely hour and at this very second, my withering ovaries could be spitting out the last tired egg, but I wouldn’t know it. That is not the kind of pressure I feel. Instead, I feel the same pressure I felt when I brought home my first B+. I know that when my parents ask me if I’ve found a husband, they are referring to a very specific kind, a Korean, Catholic, Harvard-educated doctor/lawyer/orthodontist husband. My last few boyfriends have not fulfilled any of these requirements. The one who came closest was Aaron, who only went to M.I.T., which is down the street from Harvard, but he was white and Jewish. Korean Catholic men from Harvard just don’t interest me. The problem is, if I marry a man I like, my parents are in for a big let-down, and as much as I hate to admit it, I don’t want to disappoint them. So it seems easier to never fully commit to anyone than to commit to someone and disappoint my parents. This makes me a bad girlfriend.

  I dated Aaron for six years and even lived with him at one point, and I never told my parents about him. On the other hand, I didn’t exactly hide Aaron from my parents either. I’ve known him since I was twelve and we both attended the same junior high, high school, and college, and even moved to New York together. My parents knew him as one of my best friends. Aaron was the brightest kid in high school, but he also dyed his unruly blond hair and his King Tut goatee blue. When we both returned to Los Angeles for the holidays, I always invited him over to my parents’ house for a Korean dinner, as I did other friends. He always arrived on time, with fruit (the appropriate Korean dinner gift) or my mother’s favorite coffee beans (Swiss Chocolate Raspberry) in hand. He did everything right, with only a little coaching from me. Aaron and my parents, especially my mother, got along well. He was charming at the dinner table—making jokes, complimenting my mother’s cooking, and shooing her out of the kitchen so he could do the dishes. Since he was always around, I figured my parents would guess that we were more than friends, and I hoped my mother would be smitten with Aaron and say, “Anne, why you not marry Aaron, he seem like such nice, Jewish boy.” But she never did. Of course, I could have said, “Mom, Aaron is a nice, Jewish boy, I like him. Why don’t I marry him?” But I never did because I knew how that conversation would go:

  “OH MY GOD. Such shame! Such shame!”

  “But he’s a nice guy. He’s smart and funny and he smells good most of the time.”

  “Why you do this to you Mommy?”

  “I’m not doing anything to you!”

  “Yes you do. You give me cancer. In my heart.” She clutches her chest and weeps, her eyeliner flowing down her face in black rivers. “How I survive this? My only daughter marry JEW!” She shakes her spatula at me and a little hot oil splatters on my clothes. She has been frying scallion pancakes.

  “He’s not orthodox or anything. He eats pork.”

  “Then he bad Jew! You can’t even marry good Jew! How he eat kim chee?”

  “What are you talking about? He loves kim chee. He’d eat a lobster stuffed with kim chee and bacon if you let him.”

  She looks around the room, her eyes spinning wildly in her head, and runs to a window. “I jump. If you marry him, I jump!”

  “You’re not gonna jump, stop being crazy.”

  “Yes, I jump.” She slides the window open. An Arctic gale gusts through the room. It appears that hell has frozen over.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Yes. When I die you say, ‘Oh I such bad daughter. Waaah!’ You come to Mommy funeral but you have to sit in back of church.” She looks at me with tears in her eyes, and looks out the window.

  “Don’t do it! You’re being ridiculous.”

  “How come you love Jewish Aaron more than you mommy?” Then, she jumps. I roll my eyes because our kitchen is on the ground floor.

  Aaron never pressured me about marriage; he knew about the unspoken family rule. Any motions toward matching jewelry had to come from me. But even after six years of dating, I was still scared to let our relationship go any further. I fooled myself into thinking it was because I didn’t love him, but I think knowing that I was going to disappoint my parents prevented me from being
fully committed. When Aaron and I broke up, I was sad, but relieved. It was as if I had averted a conflict that was six years in the making.

  Recently, my cousin Andy came to visit a friend in New York for a weekend, and we met up for brunch. I hadn’t seen him since 2003, when he brought Chinese Julie to New Year’s dinner. As always, he looked healthy and happy, though his facial hair was a little disturbing.

  “What’s that strapped to your face? A hamster?”

  He stroked his chin. “What, you don’t like it?”

  “I don’t like hamsters. They’re like mice that you keep around on purpose.”

  He laughed and we walked toward a café in the West Village. His eyes tracked all the trendy New York girls as they strutted down the street carrying shopping bags and towing little dogs wearing sweaters.

  “You like what you see? You think they’re better looking in New York?”

  Andy grinned sheepishly. “Actually, I was looking at the way they walk.”

  “Oh sure, I look at the way guys walk all the time.”

  “No seriously, it’s what I do.” Andy is a physical therapist and he was recently promoted at his clinic. “Half the time I don’t even look at them, I’m just looking at how messed up their knees are, and then I think of exercises they could do to fix them.” I laughed, surprised by my cousin’s geekiness, normally he is a smooth-talking, slick guy.

  “It’s the pointy shoes. Those things are deadly. If you opened a practice here you’d make a killing just from pointy shoes.”

  “I’m working too much. This is the first vacation I’ve taken in four years. I never have any time.”

  “What about Julie? Are you guys still together?”

  “No, we broke up.”

  “Sorry.” I could hear my parents wail, See? So confuse!

  “She went off to pharmacy school. Couldn’t handle the distance.”

  “I liked her, she was cool.” I shrugged. “You dating anyone now?”

  He shook his head. “No, too busy. You? You got anyone to bring home to your parents?”

  I paused. There were no parents or uncles or aunts around. It was just us. I could tell himabout every guy I’ve ever dated, but I decided to be cautious. His mother, like mine, talks a lot. Maybe too much. “Well, you know, I can only bring home the guy I’m going to marry, so that’s not happening anytime soon.”

  He laughed. “It’s the same in my family too. Like I never told my parents who I was dating, and then I was talking to my mom one day and she was like, I feel that I don’t really know you, like I know nothing about your personal life. So I was like, yeah, you’re right, we should be closer and all that stuff. So I started bringing around my girlfriends.”

  “And bringing them to family dinners.”

  “Yeah, and then one day my mom was like, who are all these girls? Why do you keep bringing all these girls home?”

  I started laughing. “Because she told you to!”

  “No kidding. She was so confused. So then I was like, I thought you wanted to be close and know more about my personal life. And she said, actually no. Don’t bring anymore girls around until you get engaged.”

  I laughed; it all made sense to me, why my cousin introduced two girls to the family. But I did have one question. “Why didn’t your mom stop you from bringing your girlfriends to meet the whole family? You know, my parents were pretty annoyed. I’m sure the other uncles and aunts were too.”

  Andy stopped laughing. “Really?

  “Yeah.”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t say anything. I thought that was what my mom wanted.”

  “It was what she wanted and then it wasn’t, I guess.”

  Andy shook his head. “I’ve got to stop listening to my parents.”

  “No, just hide everything. It’s healthier that way.”

  We finished our brunch and walked back to my neighborhood. I pointed out where to get the best pizza in New York (John’s on Bleecker Street) and the most overrated cupcakes in the city (Magnolia Bakery), where he could buy expensive “yoga-inspired jewelry” (Satya), and I pointed to a salon that specialized in Scandinavian hair designs, whatever that meant. When we reached my block, I pointed to a store called LeSportsac.

  “Contrary to popular belief, they don’t sell jockstraps. They sell handbags.”

  He grinned. “Would you ever move back to L.A.?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Our family’s annoying. But I feel closer to them by being far away. Does that make sense?”

  “Kind of.” Andy laughed. “Hey, you know, I think this is the first time we’ve ever hung out without our families.

  “No kidding?” I thought for a second. He was right. In twenty-eight years, I had never spent time with Andy alone, even though we grew up twenty minutes from each other. “You know, you’re pretty cool. I’d actually hang out with you even if we weren’t related.”

  He smiled, took out his digital camera, and took a picture of us in front of the overpriced salty French bistro on my corner.

  One of the advantages of being the youngest in my family, or at least in my generation, is that I can watch while my older cousins forge new ground and I can learn from their mistakes. Yoonmi and her fiancé taught me that no matter how perfect the guy seems and no matter how happy the guy makes me, he’ll still be under a lot of scrutiny from my family, and chances are, if he’s dating me, he’ll have a lot of faults. Andy and his girlfriends showed me that I shouldn’t expect a warm welcome for someone whose name is Filipina Eunice or Chinese Julie or Jewish Aaron. In the end, I am a coward. I date guys who are good enough for me, but I question whether or not they’ll be good enough for my family, and this holds my relationships back—not only my intimate relationships but also my family relationships. I could be like Andy and bring someone important home; someone whom I may or may not marry. But my fear of disapproval is hard to overcome. How can I be truly committed to my boyfriends if they can’t meet the people who are important to me? And how can I be truly close to my family if I have to hide someone important from them? Maybe I just have to take a risk and believe that the guy I love will be someone my family will love too.

  NEW YEAR’S GAMES

  “So, will everyone be around for Christmas this year?”

  I cradled the phone to my ear while I searched the Internet for flights to Los Angeles. As usual, my mother was in the car and the radio was blaring in the background. This time a Korean vocalist was singing a traditional folk song; her voice wailed and cracked and made my toes curl. Korean folk singers always sound drunk and clinically depressed.

  “Yes, Anne, we be here.”

  “You’re not going to Las Vegas? You’re not going on some golf trip or something?”

  Last Christmas, I told my mother I couldn’t come home for the holidays because of work. She got so upset that I convinced my boss to let me take a working holiday. This thrilled my mother and she chattered gleefully about cooking an elaborate Christmas dinner for the family—turkey and the trimmings plus a Korean feast. I arrived on Christmas morning and discovered that my mother had gone to Las Vegas with her sister and mother. My brother decided to spend Christmas with his friend in San Diego, and my father was tied up with a big project at his lab. I was infuriated and vowed never to come home again, not until my family had been replaced by a real one.

  “Anne, I tell you, we stay here.”

  “And for New Year’s Day? That’s still going on? Everyone will be there for that?”

  “Yes, we go you uncle house.”

  New Year’s Day is an important holiday for Koreans. Our entire extended family gathers together for a party, during which we point out one anothers’ weaknesses. I’m too short, my brother is too fat, my aunt is too loud, my older cousin Yoon-chong is too old to be single, etc.

  “OK and you sure everyone’s not gonna take off somewhere without telling me? You’re absolutely, positively sure? Like one hundred percent sure?”

  “ANNE. YES.”

/>   “So, let me make this clear, EVERYONE will be there?”

  “YES, EVERYONE. OK now you stop bother Mommy. You make me such headache and you not even here yet!”

  Right after I clicked “Confirm Your Order” on the United Airlines webpage, I felt anxious. Seven days with my family by my own accord. I must be high on crack. How would I survive? How would we survive each other? Is pepper spraying a loved one legal in California? I scratched my neck until it was bright pink. Family has always made me a little rashy, a physical manifestation of emotional irritation.

  The flight from New York to Los Angeles was heinous. I sat next to a chatty obese woman who had to be shoehorned into her seat. Her excess invaded my space and I had to wedge my hand between her folds to find the end of my seatbelt. Her necklace had enormous silver disks that I swear were the size of dinner plates. She kept on asking me questions while I was watching the in-flight movie or reading my book or sleeping. She was getting on my last nerve, which I had been saving for my family. I missed my connecting flight in Denver and was stranded for several hours. When I finally arrived at my parents’ house, completely exhausted, I found out Mike wasn’t coming home for the holidays. I felt cheated. Apparently, when my mother said “everyone,” she meant “everyone except my brother.”

  “Mom, you told me everyone would be here. Why didn’t he come? I came. He should come. He has to suffer with the rest of us.”

  My mother was getting ready for her church’s Christmas party. Just as I did when I was little, I leaned against the bathroom wall and watched her meticulously apply makeup in the mirror. When I was young, I knew exactly which item she needed next and handed it to her—loose powder, a palette of eye shadow, lip liner. She took the mascara brush away from her lashes so she could roll her eyes at me.

  “Anne, what you mean ‘suffer’?”

  “I mean I’m here, so Mike should be here.”

  “He just move. So I tell him not come.”

  “What? Why would you do that? Remember last year? I told you I couldn’t come and you got all upset. You were like, ‘Ohhh my only daughter not love me waaah.’”