Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  “He’s gone to pick up some lumber,” I answered.

  Jin’s expression was strictly deer-in-the-headlights.

  “Mrs. Braydon, I…I didn’t know you were here…I thought you’d be at work. I didn’t see your car. I thought Nate…I’ll come back later.”

  “No, no, come on in, Jin,” I said.

  The young woman had always impressed me as being cool as a cucumber and totally in control of every situation she encountered. Today, however, she seemed anxious, jittery. I assumed that she and Nate remained friends, although I could never remember seeing them together in public. I was sure her parents probably still didn’t approve. That undoubtedly explained her nervousness at being around me. I wanted her to feel at home. I wished that she and Nate were still dating. I couldn’t say that to her face. It would be like saying, “I’m right, your parents are wrong.” But I thought by being open, friendly, welcoming, she’d get the message.

  “Come in and let me make you some tea,” I said. “I’ve got some new herbal stuff that I got in Tulsa at Wild Oats Community Market. It’s fabulous.”

  Jin looked like she wanted to refuse, but she didn’t.

  She followed me into the kitchen and made herself at home at our breakfast nook.

  “Nate built that,” I told her, indicating the wainscoted benching and the half-moon table.

  “I know,” she answered. Her tone was so sorrowful and sad, I turned to give her another look. Her eyes wouldn’t meet mine and I couldn’t read the expression on her face. I decided to be upbeat.

  “So, how’s school?” I asked, falling back on the requisite grown-up-to-student question. “Hye Won tells me that you’re majoring in chemistry. Are you going to go into pharmacology, too?”

  Jin shrugged. “Maybe drug research,” she answered. “I don’t want to be tied down to a pharmacy counter all my life.”

  I nodded. “Drug research is certainly important,” I said. “And a growing field.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The conversation was dying. I tried again.

  “You’re home for spring break already?” I said. “Lauren gets hers next week.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “I came home early.”

  “Jin, is something wrong?” I didn’t really need to ask. I knew there had to be a reason for this bright, sunny young woman to be sad and monosyllabic. “You can talk to me,” I assured her. “Tell me what’s wrong?”

  She didn’t answer immediately, and when she did, she was defensive.

  “I need to talk to Nate, that’s all.”

  Her hands were folded in front of her on the table. I don’t know what caused me to reach out to her, but I did. She jerked back, but I held her hand gently, but firmly, in my own.

  “If you can talk to Nate about it,” I said, “you can talk to me. Something is terribly wrong, I can tell. You’ve got to tell someone. Nate’s not here, tell me.”

  She looked at me then, directly, her eyes locked with my eyes. She was so young and so pretty and so sad.

  “Tell me,” I urged.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  Strangely, the admission came as a total surprise. I’m sure my expression must have been incredulous. I was sure I hadn’t heard her correctly.

  “You’re pregnant?”

  She wasn’t looking at me anymore, she was looking down at our hands, still entwined across the table.

  “Who’s—” I began, but I knew the answer before the question got out of my mouth. “It’s Nate’s.”

  She nodded ever so slightly, ever so stalwartly. Her face was a mask of calm, but one tiny tear escaped her eye and trailed down her cheek.

  “Everything will be all right,” I assured her, rather lamely. I felt as if the roof had fallen in on me. “It will all be fine. This kind of thing happens all the time.”

  “It doesn’t happen to me,” she said with a choke, struggling against her emotions before dissolving into tears.

  Her breakdown snapped me into action. I was the adult here. I was the one who had to keep a perspective.

  I scooted around the bench seat until I was beside her. I put my arm around her shoulders and allowed her to cry.

  “Only stupid girls get pregnant,” she snapped angrily. “I’m stupid, stupid, stupid!”

  “Shh, honey, that’s not true,” I whispered.

  “I’ve been on birth control for years,” she said. “I’ve always been careful. Always. But I was away at school and it didn’t seem important. I thought I wasn’t going to need it. And then when I came home at Christmas we started up again. I started back on the pills right away.” She shook her head regretfully. “I guess it wasn’t soon enough.”

  I listened to her tears, her anger, her self-reproach, and I remembered my own. It had been so very long ago. But it felt like only yesterday.

  She began to gain control, but she was sniffling. I couldn’t get up to get her a tissue. I thought if I let her go, she might run away. I handed her a pile of paper napkins and she blew her nose.

  “I don’t suppose your parents know,” I said.

  “No, absolutely not,” she said, shaking her head. “They can’t ever know. You’ve got to promise you won’t tell them.”

  “Jin, they’ll have to find out eventually,” I said. “If you got pregnant at Christmas, you’ll be showing in a couple of months.”

  She turned to glare at me.

  “I’m not having a baby!” she said. “I can’t have a baby.”

  Momentarily I was puzzled.

  “I came to get Nate to go with me,” Jin explained. “I’m going to go see a doctor, get an appointment for an abortion.”

  “Oh.” I must have pulled away from her. I don’t remember doing it, but now my hands were over my mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Braydon,” she said. “I can’t have a baby. I have a scholarship. I’m halfway to my degree. I want graduate school and a career. I can’t have a baby, not now.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t,” Jin said. “You can’t understand what it’s like. For my parents, Korean parents, their children’s achievement is everything to them. They gave up their home, their friends, their family, their careers, everything that was familiar and that they held dear, to come to America and be laborers. They live their lives here, where they will always be outsiders and always suspect. They did that so that my brothers and sister and I would have a brighter future. If I don’t finish school, if I don’t do something with my life, it’s a slap in the face to them. It’s like saying their sacrifice meant nothing to me.”

  “They will understand,” I assured her. “Parents, all parents, they understand. Yes, they’ll be disappointed, but when they see this baby, their first grandchild, they’ll feel differently.”

  Jin shook her head. “They’ll feel differently, all right,” she said, sarcastically. “Their first grandchild and he’s only half Korean. That will go over real well.”

  I shook my head. “It’s hard to dislike a baby, any baby. Especially one that’s your own flesh and blood.”

  “They don’t like Nate at all,” she said. “I think they must hate him. Every time his name even comes up, my father gets angry and my mother has something mean to say about him. They forbade me to date him years ago. I told them I wouldn’t. I’ve just kept lying to them.”

  “Then it’s time to stop,” I told her. “It’s time to own up to everything and start moving forward from here.”

  “But I can’t have a baby,” Jin repeated. “A baby would ruin my life. It would ruin all my plans.”

  “Yes, it would,” I agreed. “But, Jin, honey, you can always come up with new plans. I make up new plans for my life every day. And if there is anything that I can testify to, it’s that the things I haven’t planned have turned out to be best.”

  “Don’t you believe in a woman’s right to choose?” she asked me.

  “I do,” I told her. “I absolutely do. No woman should bear a child because somebody else
tells her she has to. Every baby born deserves to be wanted.”

  She nodded, but there was still question in her eyes.

  I continued. “The word choose implies there are at least two answers to the question. Or in your case, two different paths in front of you. You’re at a crossroads.”

  I was thinking of my own crossroads and I was hoping, praying that some wisdom I might have gleaned would help.

  “You can continue down the path you’ve been on,” I told her. “You can keep lying to your parents about being in love with Nate. Or you can stop loving him, stop seeing him. You can continue your education and go toward all those things that you think that you want. But in order to really choose, you’ve got to give some thought to that other path, the one that you’ll leave behind forever.”

  She frowned. She looked so young, so scared. I smoothed a stray hair away from her face and laid my hand against her chin.

  “You’re afraid of that other path,” I said. “You’re afraid because you don’t know what may be down there and you think it might be bad. Your family may be disappointed in you. Your life may be harder than you hoped. Your dreams may get postponed or even canceled. All those things may happen, but they may not. The truth is, you don’t know what’s really around the corner of either one of these paths. Do you?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “You’re a scientist, Jin. Scientists don’t make decisions based upon what frightens them or what they think they know.”

  Sam

  1998

  We knew immediately the day that Jin finally told her parents. I remember that morning perfectly. It was still early on Main Street, no one but the store owners were there. The business district of my childhood had developed into a very slick retro look in keeping with the city’s new motto prominently displayed on billboards along the expressway: Lumkee, Oklahoma: Small Town America.

  The truth was that Lumkee had long since ceased being “small town America.” It was suburbia with a small core of tourist-friendly streets kept like a living museum of the 1950s.

  But it was what had kept the downtown from dying completely. There were lots of little communities, once Lumkee’s rivals, that were now nearly deserted, their buildings boarded up and their young families moving elsewhere. We were close enough to Tulsa to have been swallowed up by it. Yet, we had enough local people who wanted the old Lumkee to linger that we’d managed to save a few vestiges of the past.

  I drove down the alley to my parking place behind the back door. Hye Won came out of her store immediately, as if she’d been watching for me. She approached me carrying some papers. I gave her a big grin, but she wasn’t smiling.

  “Good morning, Mr. Braydon. I hope that you and your family are well.”

  Her words and the expression of her greeting were very formal, as if we hadn’t been friends and business associates for years.

  “We’re fine,” I told her. “Is everything okay at your house?”

  She nodded but didn’t elaborate on that.

  “My father and mother have asked me to convey their abject apologies,” she said. “They will not be at their jobs today, and they have asked me to humbly present these letters of resignation.”

  I accepted the proffered papers and quickly glanced through them. They were formal and generic, without complaint or explanation.

  I glanced up at Hye Won. She gave me a little nod as if our discussion was finished.

  “Wait,” I insisted. “This is about Jin and Nate, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t say anything and her expression was unreadable.

  I took a deep breath, trying to figure out what to say.

  “I can only apologize for my son,” I finally managed. “I am very sorry if Nate’s behavior has…has insulted your family or…dishonored your sister. I…they are grown, adult people. I…”

  Hye Won held up her hand and shook her head.

  “Please Mr. Braydon,” she said. “Do not concern yourself with this. My father does not hold you accountable for any bad behavior. It is not that at all.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “It is very Korean. The relationship between our families is now forever changed. My father cannot be employed by the family of his daughter’s lover. It just cannot be done. It would be a shame and an embarrassment for him. I am sorry.”

  So that was it. Mr. and Mrs. Chai never set foot in Okie Tamales again. Their son Chano came in that afternoon to retrieve their personal items from their lockers. He requested that their last paychecks be mailed.

  The rest of the Korean staff showed up on time, but most immediately gave notice. They didn’t want to work for me. They had only stayed because they worked for Mr. Chai. I managed to convince them, with bonuses, to stretch out their termination dates so that I would have time to hire replacement staff.

  The last of the Korean employees were gone by the first of June. I was employing anybody that I could. Over the summer, it was mostly high school kids. But the wonderful life I’d been leading, with a dependable, hardworking, trustworthy production line, was a thing of the past.

  Not that non-Koreans weren’t good workers. Many were. But the commitment to a difficult, monotonous job was hard to maintain. The turnover was constant. I eventually found three middle-aged women who I could count on to stay, and they kept the revolving door of other employees trained. But I was now full-time production manager as well as working sales, delivery, human resources and payroll. Twelve-to fourteen-hour days now became the norm.

  The Chais bought a small building across the street. It had been a dry cleaners when I was a kid. For the last several years it had been a gift shop. They opened a small grocery. The bins of produce were kept out on the sidewalk. That was a good idea since the interior of the place, crowded with merchandise, was hardly big enough for a half dozen customers. It was quite a contrast to the huge supermarkets where we all shopped. I was certain that nobody would come downtown to buy groceries.

  And I couldn’t understand why the Chais didn’t just retire. Their oldest son was married now, well off and appeared quite capable of supporting them. Hye Won had a thriving business as well and looked after her parents in her own home. Chano was graduating high school. Although he wasn’t brilliant, like the rest of the kids, he was a good-looking, affable guy. Plenty smart enough for any reasonable purpose. He’d gotten an athletic scholarship to run track at Kansas State.

  And there was Jin. Jin was living at our house. She and Nate were still not married. I couldn’t begin to know what was going on between those two. But with Lauren off to school and mainly involved in saving the world, Corrie and Jin had somehow become very close.

  “We have mo-jeong,” Corrie explained to me one night as she sat up in bed reading. Her stack of books on Korean history and culture was on the bedside table.

  “Moo-junk?” I asked. “Is that like the Korean word for bullshit?”

  She gave me a look, not appreciating my humor at all.

  “Mo-jeong,” she corrected. “It’s a bond of trust between two people. Jin and I recognize that we are inevitably connected by ties of caring, respect and nurturing.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re really getting into this Korean stuff, huh?”

  “It just helps me understand what’s going on so much better,” she said. “So much of Korean culture is left unsaid. They all understand what’s meant, but those of us from Western culture are just clueless.”

  I shrugged.

  “Weren’t you confused about the Chais’ attitude to Jin finishing her semester at Syracuse?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “It would have been stupid to drop out in April when she could easily do two more months of school and have that many more credits toward her degree.”

  “That’s what I thought exactly,” Corrie said. “As long as she’s healthy, she should finish the courses she’d signed up for. The Chais are so keen on education, I thought they should see t
hat. But in Korean culture they believe that the lessons the baby is learning inside the mother’s womb are as important as the first ten years of education after birth. They want the mothers-to-be to refrain from stressful endeavors, live in peaceful surroundings, read only good literature, look at beautiful pictures and eat colorful, exquisitely prepared food. Knowing this, of course, they wouldn’t want her to return to a dorm room, eating in the cafeteria and knuckling down to the rigors of education.”

  “The Chais are very smart people,” I pointed out. “They wouldn’t believe all this stupid stuff like a pregnant woman looking at beautiful pictures and reading good books helps the baby.”

  “What about that finding on classical music?” she asked me. “Now the pregnant American moms are playing Mozart with the headphones on their belly because they think it makes the child’s brain form more intricate neural connections, which will raise the kid’s math scores ten years later.”

  “Okay, maybe there is something to that,” I said.

  “Besides, it’s a difficult and confusing time for Jin’s family,” Corrie said. “In difficult and confusing times, we all fall back on what we know and what we perceive as familiar.”

  Around my house, there was very little that I perceived as familiar. Jin had moved into Nate’s room, which Corrie had totally redecorated in pale yellow. The curtains and bedding were patterned in Asian-style flowers. Nate had been banished to his workshop, where he’d carved out a corner for his own living quarters. I didn’t know if his living separately had to do with them not being married or was more of the Korean birth preparation.

  On September 28 at 3:55 in the afternoon, Makayla Moon Braydon was born at Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa. She weighed six pounds, five ounces.

  Mr. Chai, Jin’s brother Song and I spent about three hours hanging around the waiting room together. Mr. Chai was open, friendly, cheerful—just as I remembered him when he used to work for me. Song carried most of the conversation. He had been in this very room only six weeks earlier when his wife gave birth to their firstborn son.

  Nate and all the women were all in the labor room with Jin. Corrie had studied for this day as if it were a final exam. She was determined to win over the entire Chai family and heal the breach between Jin and her mother by being rigorously attentive to the taegyo and samchilil. Whether that actually worked or not, I don’t know. But in the three weeks after Makayla came home from the hospital, Mrs. Chai or Hye Won were in my house more than I was.