Secondhand World Read online

  You could tell it was a Western wedding because my parents weren't wearing traditional Korean costume. You could tell because only Caucasians looked on in the background, a blond woman in a green dress with her hands up as though she'd been clapping, an older man with glasses who looked like one of my father's professors. You could tell because my parents were smiling, my father in that uneasy closed-mouth way he had, my mother more relaxed, genuine, showing her teeth inside the red coral of her lips.

  According to Korean superstition, if a bride smiles, the firstborn will be a girl. Wedding portraits are mostly somber affairs, the woman with her head bowed, showing the straight middle part of her hair, and the groom with a serious expression, his own sober face serving as instruction for his wife. Of course, the assumption is that you wouldn't want to smile. Daughters you raise for another family, a Korean saying goes. Only sons remain your own.

  I used to wonder at this photograph. How my father could've been so careless. My mother I understood, for she meant to break tradition, her smile like a thumb in the eye of expectation. She's triumphant in her white wedding gown—white, the Korean color of mourning—clutching the knife in both hands as though cleaving her way to the future. But my father, the orphan with the Sohn family name on the line, should have been more vigilant. Ordinarily so serious and cautious, how could he have failed to see—with those intent, piercing eyes—the tragic consequences ofthat one shy smile?

  Over a period of about five years—from the time I was two to the time I was seven—my mother had a series of miscarriages. Each episode left her rattled and weak, and my father was forced to take charge of my welfare while she recuperated in bed. These were among the best times I can remember spending with him. For dinner he would make Sapporo Ichiban ramen noodles, which he bought in cases from an Asian grocery store in New Haven, sometimes adding garish pink slices of kamaboko, Japanese fish cake, and crunchy yellow takwang pickle. My favorite was a version with a beaten egg dropped in the broth, its eggy yellow tendrils fixing from viscous liquid, like a magic trick.

  After dinner we'd sit on the hideous green-striped couch, a hand-me-down from my father's thesis advisor. My father would bring out his pipe and fuss with the paraphernalia of tobacco and matches, the result of which would be a pleasant piney smell, like a campfire, that I came to identify with him long after he'd quit the pipe for good.

  Sometimes he would listen to me read books aloud, Animal Riddles and Hop on Pop. Once when I was seven, I read him the first paragraph of a Time magazine article about a microscopic parasite that lived in human eyelashes. He was so impressed that he took his pipe out of his mouth and told me to go on.

  At night he'd turn on the black-and-white television set. Reception was poor, and the two stations we got came in on a slant, stretched to the left and quivering slightly; Walter Cron-kite was accompanied by a gray penumbra that vibrated behind his head like some carnivorous shadow. It was wartime, the casualty count kept like a sports score in a running tally at the top of the screen—images of soldiers in the jungle, their dog tags settled against hairless chests, eyes empty, helmets like tortoise shells. Riveted, my father sat, chomping on the stem of his pipe, shifting it from one side of his mouth to the other. Occasionally something he saw would cause him to shake his head and make a violent clucking noise of shame or disbelief, and his pipe would fall to his lap with a spray of sparks.

  If I tried to get his attention during the news, he'd shush me, holding up a hand in warning. “Don't interrupt, Myung Hee,” he'd say to me. “It is war.”

  When I was seven, my mother became pregnant again, and this time they were confident enough to tell me. A brother on the way, my father told me. Or sister, my mother said, though she, too, wished for a boy, to please my father and to one-up her mother, who'd produced nothing but girls.

  And a boy it was. My brother, Stephen Myung Hwan Sohn, born two weeks prematurely, at only five pounds. Jaundiced from birth, he had to stay in the hospital for a week, basking under special heat lamps like a tiny sunbather.

  I went to the hospital with my father and looked in the nursery window. My father tapped the glass as a nurse held Stephen up. Wrapped in flannel, with a knit cap on his head, my brother squinted, fists balled and flailing. My father made clucking noises with his tongue on the roof of his mouth. I thought Stephen looked like Mr. Magoo, the blind old man in the cartoon, but when I told my father, he did not laugh.

  “This is your brother,” he said, looking not at me but into the window. He said it sternly, as though I'd called him ugly. My father continued to tap the glass and cluck, and the expression on his face, repeated in his reflection, was rapt, like a window-shopper gazing in at some glittering object he has no means to pay for.

  In between my father and the window, I waved too, but I was aggrieved. My brother's face was mottled from crying and yellow with jaundice, his eyes screwed up like knotholes, mouth agape. He was cranky and funny-looking, and I felt no kinship to him. Behind me, my father tapped and cooed with a tenderness that made him strange to me. I pressed my forehead to the cool glass and closed my eyes.

  Isatree

  Whatever my initial impressions, I soon learned to adore my brother. I pushed his carriage proudly down the sidewalk, my mother beside me with a wary hand outstretched. He was an exuberant baby, sloe-eyed and fat, with red, round cheeks and a gummy grin. He wore a white bonnet with eyelet lace, which my mother had ordered from a Sears catalog, and a pastel blue terry-cloth jumpsuit with snaps down the front, a picture of a lamb or bunny sewn on the chest.

  Strangers would beam down at Stephen and I would stand over him like a carny barker, demonstrating how he could grip my finger so tightly, how he could coo and gurgle, how his sturdy little legs could bicycle in the air with delight. “Amazing baby! Step right up, step right this way!”

  My father accepted a job at the state university in Albany when I was nine and Stephen was almost two, and we moved from our tiny Connecticut apartment to a suburb in upstate New York. The houses in our development were ranches or colonials, with blue or white aluminum siding and a bit of brick around the front doors.

  Ours was the only split-level, made of gray clapboard, with a long roof slanting to one side. It was a modern-looking house, with large picture windows and a living room that occupied the entire middle story. Although the other houses sat in cleared lots with a tree or two in the front yard, ringed by geraniums or marigolds, our house was surrounded by trees—two fat oaks in front that must have been hundreds of years old, two maples at the back that sawed at our roof and bedroom windows when it was windy.

  My mother loved that we had our own yard, a third of an acre with a stand of white birch in the back. It was there that my brother learned to walk, toddling unsteadily from the front of the house to the back, in the mud brown corrective shoes he had to wear. My mother would sunbathe on a green plaid lawn chair, her already bronze limbs turning a darker, more velvety brown, pale sides of her arms upturned, her face cocked slightly backward.

  “Isa,” she'd say, out of the corner of her mouth, “watch your brother. Make sure he doesn't go out in the road.”

  There was almost no traffic, but I would chase Stephen across the lawn, picking him up by the straps of his overalls and swinging him to a halt. We would race Matchbox cars down the gentle slope of our driveway, dodging acorns and bits of twig that the oaks constantly shed. Stephen ran to retrieve the cars at the bottom and brought them back, loudly proclaiming his victory.

  During a fifth-grade field trip to a tree nursery, we were each given a small pine to take home and plant. Stephen used his plastic beach shovel to help me dig a hole on the side of our yard. I used a metal spade, supervised by my father, who knew nothing about gardening but much about dangerous instruments in the hands of children. I was proud of the little tree that I plopped into that hole, tamping down the loose soil like I was tucking it in bed.

  We didn't realize that I'd planted it over the septic system, but the tree
grew impressively in the next five years, straight up, with no branches except the two it started with, a telephone pole with a pair of straggly arms.

  “Isatree,” Stephen called it. Isatree—all one word. For years it was home base for our tag and hide-and-seek games, the bark worn smooth at the spots where our hands would touch it. I got pine pitch in my hair once from leaning against it, and my mother had to cut the tangle out with scissors while I cried.

  I see Stephen underneath Isatree, much too short to reach the first branch, his hands in front of his face. He's grinning, peeking out from his fingers to see if I'm coming. Of course I pretend I can't find him, pacing the lawn, loudly lamenting, “Where's Stephen? Where could he be?” until, unable to stand it anymore, my brother drops his hands and comes running toward me.

  “Here I am, here I am, Ee-see,” he says.

  Chink

  Hey, Chink. Chinky Chink Chink.”

  “Gook girl, why don't you go home where you belong?”

  “Yeah, gookland. Go back to gookland.”

  I sit closest to the window on the bus seat, perfectly rigid, unmoving. Next to me Jenny Going is sure not to let her shoulder or knee touch mine.

  We pull up to the entrance of the school. Outside, the bus monitors cross their arms against the chill as kids spill from buses like misshapen beads and scatter along the sidewalk.

  “What's the matter, gook?”

  “What's the matter, Chinee?”

  I feel the heat in my face, blasting like a furnace. The bus slows to a halt, and we wait suspended until we hear the sigh of the brakes and the squeak of hinges as the door folds open. I stand up. Something like a SuperBall is bouncing around inside my chest, winging from my heart to my rib cage. I turn toward the boys—Roger Huckins, Tom Kerry, Paul Weaver and his brother, Jimmy—and I say, infusing my voice with a contempt I do not feel, “For your information, I'm Korean!”

  A look of confusion clouds their faces. “What's that?” says Roger Huckins.

  I had not counted on this further question. “It's, like, a totally different country,” I say, following Jenny up the aisle in a haughty show of superior knowledge.

  I walk quickly toward the main entrance. Someone jostles me running past. My next step meets resistance, and the next thing I know I am falling through the air. My books and lunch box go flying, and I land on both knees on frozen asphalt.

  “That still makes you a gook,” I hear Tom Kerry say as he walks away.

  “You tell those boys,” my father says, pointing with his chopsticks at me from across the kitchen table. “You tell them Korean civilization is five thousand years old. America not even born yet, still belong to Indians and wild animals.”

  “Dad!”

  My father's eyes grow wide at my look of skepticism. “Admiral Yi invented ironclad battleships, hundreds of years before the Spanish Armada. Koreans invented printing press two hundred years before Gutenberg! You tell them—”

  “Yeobo,” my mother says. She taps her rice paddle on my father's plate, dislodging another serving. “Geurojima!” Cut it out.

  “No!” my father says, still looking at me. “Isa needs to have pride in being Korean. She needs to educate these boys. What do they know about us? Nothing. They think Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean all the same. Stupid!”

  “I tried, Dad,” I say. Though he is angry at the boys, he is yelling at me. My ignorance has contributed in some way to their ignorance; my lack of defense against attack is proof of my own dubious allegiance. “They don't care about printing presses. They don't care about ironclad boats.”

  My father's eyes narrow. “You make them care, Myung Hee,” he says.

  I imagine describing Admiral Yi's turtle boat to Tom Kerry, the ingenuity of its design—a craft light enough to skim the ocean, yet cast in iron to ward off enemy weaponry. I imagine explaining the significance of the Gutenberg Bible, the preemptive brilliance of the Korean minds that engineered moveable type.

  I picture Tom's jaw dropping in admiration. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I thought you were just a dumb gook.”

  I give my father a sideways look. His chopsticks are still thrust in my direction. “Right, Dad,” I say, wasting my sarcasm in the face of his righteousness. “Whatever you say.”

  Acquire

  My parents were fast on their way to gaining the American dream: a steady, good-paying job; a car that ran; one child of each gender; a nice suburban house with a two-car garage and a bit of yard to tend and mow.

  Christmases became a slugfest of torn wrapping paper and stick-on bows from which emerged board games, toy trains, Farberware, teddy bears, vinyl records, Fair Isle sweaters, and once— from my father to my mother—a rabbit-skin coat. I owned a red Schwinn three-speed bike. My father had a set of Titleist golf clubs in a sleek leather bag. Stephen had a jungle gym in the backyard with its own swing, teeter-totter, and plastic slide. And my mother, who presided over all purchases with girlish wonder, had a rose floral couch with matching wing chairs, a Zenith television, and wall-to-wall carpeting in beige.

  One of my mother's favorite objects was a merry-go-round of gold angels that she placed on the coffee table every Christmas. When she lit the candles, the angels would orbit a gold pole in the middle, which was stamped with five-pointed stars. I used to sit between the Christmas tree and the table, watching the angels spin, fascinated by the motion that seemed to be caused by the heat. My father tried to explain the physics to me once, but I preferred the incomprehensible mystery.

  For a few months in 1970 my mother's consumer dreams settled on an avocado green Whirlpool dishwasher with automatic settings. We'd never owned a dishwasher. I was almost twelve, but I was never asked to do more than clear the table or dry, while my mother donned yellow Playtex gloves and attacked the dishes with sudsy water and Brillo.

  She took us to an appliance store one day, driving the new Dodge that we'd bought five months before. My mother dressed up when she went out, and now she checked her coral lipstick in the rearview mirror, adjusted a clip-on earring, and smoothed a hand down the back of her wig.

  “Let's go eye-shop,” she said, as we pulled into the parking lot. That's what she called window-shopping, though she seldom just looked. Stephen and I were used to these jaunts, and, though we couldn't have cared less about appliances, furniture, or women's clothing, we were easily swayed by her enthusiasms.

  Inside the store, Stephen and I played hide-and-seek up and down the corridors of refrigerators and washer/dryers. I snuck from row to row, a little anxious when I didn't immediately discover my brother's blue plaid shirt and shiny black hair, but he always reappeared eventually, crawling out from behind an oven or a freezer, running to find me, his mouth wide in the ecstasy of our reunion.

  We returned to our mother's side in time to watch her commune with the display dishwashers, listening to the fervent sales pitch of a man with a black mustache.

  “This one is your most ee-conomical model,” he said, spreading his hands proudly atop a dishwasher as though it were a prize heifer. My mother stroked its glossed surface with her delicate fingers, pulled down the door to reveal the plastic racks where the dishes would go, lifted the removable basket for cutlery. She opened the top drawer, where inverted glasses could be placed in martial lines atop rubberized prongs. She pushed the drawer back in, closed the dishwasher, and fiddled with the dials and buttons, NORMAL WASH, POTS AND PANS, QUICK RINSE.

  My mother touched that dishwasher as though it were a good-luck charm, a rabbit's foot or a four-leaf clover. Her fingers left its surface with great reluctance, settling finally on the metal clasp of her handbag.

  “You can't go wrong with this particular model,” the salesman said, smiling. “It's got revolutionary technology!”

  “Y-yes, I see,” my mother said. English on her lips came out trippingly, with a sibilant charm that made it seem less accent than affectation.

  On the drive home, my mother's eyes were obsidian-bright.

  When she'd
told the salesman that she had to go home and consult her husband, he had winked at her. “Can't imagine any man could deny such a pretty wife anything,” he'd said, and my mother had blushed.

  That night she washed the dishes with a vengeance, in triple time, and I tried to keep up with her, drying them with a red-striped towel. My father sat at the kitchen table coaxing Stephen to finish his dinner.

  “Aigo, yeobo” my mother said. She peeled off her gloves and started rubbing the backs of her elbows. “So tired. Too much washing!”

  My father hardly looked up. He just nodded and opened his own mouth slightly as he urged Stephen to take a bite of peas.

  My mother tried again. She sighed, blew some hair out of her eyes. “Automatic dishwasher would save so much time,” she said. “So convenient.”

  My father didn't seem to hear.

  “Don't you think automatic dishwasher would be more convenient?” my mother persisted. “Tae Mun!”

  My father finally looked up. “Wae-geurae?” he said sharply. What's the matter?

  My mother regarded him for a moment, then wheeled around and threw the rubber gloves at his chest. “You do it!” she said, stomping out of the room with a strangled cry.

  Stephen stared with his mouth open, a half-chewed pea hanging from his bottom teeth. I continued to rub the plate in my hand with the towel. My father sprang up, and I heard his footsteps bound up the stairs and the bedroom door slam. We could hear their voices, my father's deep and in Korean only, my mother's shrill, mixing Korean and English. “You don't care,” my mother sobbed. “You don't care!”

  I listened for a while longer, tense and silent. Stephen, though he was only four, listened also. Because my parents fought mostly in Korean, we couldn't follow what was said, but we learned to listen for the waves of sound breaking upon each other, pitching toward crescendo, then falling, shrinking, finally slipping into a silence that was not exactly peace, but respite.