Other memories float through—the odd, empty saloon we stopped in during the day in Wyoming, crowned with animals’ heads on the walls. A man having a heart attack on a hike in Devils Tower national monument, his wife calling for help, my sister and father running back toward the visitor center.
I remember the lectures, as we rounded hairpin turns snaking up craggy mountains. I suffered motion sickness from the whiplash effect of our car swinging from one side to the other. “You need to eat more vegetables,” he would tell me, blaming me for my motion sickness. I would argue back, “It has to do with the inner ear, there’s nothing I can do about it!” I would cite studies that I’d read, trying to appeal to his background as a scientist, but it proved no more effective than later in life, when I cited psychology studies documenting that abuse and trauma had tangible aftereffects, that mental illness was real.
* * *
As a child I shared a thin plaster wall with my parents, my bedroom next to theirs. In the years before my father moved back to South Korea, I often heard them arguing in Korean late into the night, my father’s deep rumbling mingling with my mother’s plaintive tones.
My middle sister told me later that we had, at times, put our own small bodies between them, as a way of calming down their arguments, but this I didn’t remember. I do remember the quiet that struck, after much shouting, on the evening when their marriage seemed to split apart.
I was young then, perhaps ten years old. My mother took over my bedroom upstairs. My father sat outside on the wooden stairs, resigned, it seemed. He had fought hard and lost. “Sook, Sook,” he called over and over, in a sad lament. My mother ignored his repetition of her abbreviated name. The door stayed closed, and he didn’t invade.
Late that night, when she emerged and they spoke without their usual explosiveness, I heard him ask, in English, “What will we tell Imo?”
Imo was my mother’s closest family. She was my mother’s sister who lived in Canada, the only of our relatives who lived outside of South Korea. I knew next to nothing of her, but that she was the only person my mother spoke to with some regularity. Yet my mother wished to share nothing of my father’s pending departure from Colorado for South Korea.
“Why would we tell her anything?” my mother responded. “What business is it of hers?”
Later my mother instructed me in what to say to those who asked. My mother liked to manage things—to come up with scripts for how we should interact with outsiders, strangers. She instructed me in what to say when I answered the phone, how to talk to “Americans.” She kept them at arm’s length with politeness. It was a lesson I learned early—not to trust others with the truth.
“He moved for work,” I parroted to my best friend and her parents. I could feel its lack of truthfulness, even as I repeated this line often. I could feel the way the excuse skimmed over the chaos of my parents’ marriage, decaying like atomic particles decomposing and skidding off each other. “His English wasn’t good enough to work here.”
When I visited their calm house, in the years after he departed the country, my best friend’s mother often asked me, “How’s your father?”
And I pretended that I had an actual relationship with my father after he left, rather than occasional strained phone conversations, when we spoke for a few minutes. I pretended I knew, as though I, too, came from a stable family.
“How are you?” he would ask.
“I’m okay, how are you?” I would respond.
“I’m fine. Hand me back to your mother,” he’d say, and then I could run off again, to whatever I had been doing before the phone rang.
My parents communicated based on needs. He’d request something, “I need you to send me two pairs of Levi’s, in this size,” that sort of thing, and then he’d disappear again.
My father reappeared sporadically, for short periods during academic breaks, but he didn’t interact with us anymore. He would come downstairs from where he holed up in the master bedroom, where he perched himself in front of a small black-and-white TV. I saw him only in the kitchen, getting food, and then he would disappear upstairs into the master bedroom. He didn’t speak to me, except to complain about something or other.
My father didn’t like Korean food, preferred steak seasoned with just salt, potatoes, McDonald’s burgers and fries. But at home he still ate things like tofu, seasoned very simply and grilled, or miso soup. He chided me for cutting the tofu smaller than he liked, once as I cooked, for overcomplicating something that he wanted done just so.
He left cooking to my mother, but he preferred simple things. If you add lots of water to the leftover rice in a rice cooker, and then you boil it, you end up with a mushy porridge—one that you can eat with sliced pickles or jarred jalapeños, as a meal. This meal tastes like sick food, or like survival food. Much of Korean food seems this way—pickled to preserve, vegetable-based, soups and stews designed to stretch hunks of meat into many meals.
In his short reappearances in my life, I heard complaints and criticisms from my father, either directly or passed along through my oldest sister—about how each of us had achieved less success than our parents, despite all our advantages, about how he’d spoiled us. Then he disappeared again, his sharp comments ringing into the void.
* * *
As a very young child I was sociable and happy—I was always smiling wide in photos, on metal slides and in swings or at picnic tables, always with some kind of food smeared on my cheeks, usually something sweet like cupcake frosting. In one picture I wear red star-shaped sunglasses, my cheeks wide and pinchable, my hair bowl-cut with bangs, and I look like every other child. Innocent.
This image is hard to reconcile with the disarray that ensued after my father departed the country. My father’s presence hadn’t brought stability, happiness, or calm; but it had ensured some form of adult capability, even if erratic in form. Once my father departed, what remained was the progression of my mother’s undiagnosed illness, as well as that of my middle sister, the two forms often warring with each other.
My father’s temper had infected the house—it had been unendurable. I often fled the house, staying in the driveway in the middle hours of the night, because any escape was preferable to being around him. After he left, this departure of temper meant an improvement, in some ways. But the residue remained, in my middle sister, whom he’d beaten with abandon, who’d learned from him how to abuse. Her anger surpassed his.
“You’re her sister?” teachers often said to me at school, of my middle sister. They spoke of her admiringly. They saw her brilliance, as ferocious as that of my father’s. They saw a polite, quiet person who was somehow much more likeable than me. They didn’t see who she became at home, where she sat stewing in rage.
At home she alternated days in which she refused to acknowledge my existence, going without eye contact or saying anything, with days and nights when she flew into furies. She would erupt in fits of screaming, berating my mother for the slightest of perceived wrongs, dinging the wood floors my mother loved so much by tossing heavy items with abandon. In these fits she would destroy as much as she physically could, like a Tasmanian Devil cartoon whirlwinding through the house, throwing anything where it didn’t belong, for the sheer purpose of causing distress.
And it worked. I often found my mother crying alone in her closet, a small room lined with ugly brown carpet where she retreated in times of stress. “It’s bad for my heart,” my mother told me repeatedly, about dealing with my middle sister. “I’m so scared, and my heart. It just pounds, pounds, poun
ds.” She mimicked the gesture on her chest, while saying, again, “I’m afraid.”
I felt the need to protect my mother, but I didn’t know how to do so. The only thing I knew to do was to serve as witness, to keep a watchful eye at home, to prevent my sister from preying too much on my mother’s fearful nature, from getting too out of control. At times I made tape recordings of my sister’s outbursts, thinking that this way I had proof of her behavior, before realizing I had no adult figure to whom I could appeal for help, regardless.