At gymnastics practice, I watch Marsha as she executes some perfect back somersaults high into the air. She’s been doing gymnastics since she was in kindergarten; I didn’t join until ninth grade, and Mom and Father are still asking me at least once a week if it’s taking too much time from my homework. If Mom had started me in kindergarten, I wonder if I’d be as good as Marsha is now.
Maybe I can learn something new and exciting on the beam. How about a Valdez, that great move Marsha did at the last meet? I can easily do one on the floor mat, so how tough can it be?
I see Barbara standing by the beam, so I approach her. “I’d like to learn a Valdez on the beam,” I say.
“Huh?” she says, looking at me as if I am growing a third eye. I know that Marsha is the only person on the team who does them, but why not me, too?
I repeat myself.
“Can you do one on the floor?”
I walk over to the ratty green floor mat, sit down, flip over, and kick my legs to a handstand.
“Okay,” she says. “Now try it on the line.”
Barbara must be satisfied, because she has me climb on the low beam. “Ready?” she asks.
I have to flip over and grab a piece of the beam that’s behind me. If I miss, I could get my face smashed into the hard wood. Still, I say “Ready” and push off.
“Oof,” says Barbara as my flailing leg kicks her in the chin.
I see the beam coming at my face, but her strong arms support me, and I have enough time to grab the beam.
“That’s pretty good,” she says. “Want to try again?”
“Sure,” I say.
After practice, Beth and I take a few laps around the gym, and we then go to the locker room together.
“Wow,” she says, taking out an economy-sized container of talcum powder. “I can’t believe I saw you trying a Valdez on the beam. It looked really good.” Clouds of scented white dust rise from her like smoke.
“With Barbara holding me up and on the low beam.” I laugh, but my pride is tugging at the roots of my hair. I release my ponytail, and for a quick second, my reflection in the mirror lets me see that with my thick black hair and almond eyes, I could be considered almost pretty.
Marsha Randall and her friend Diane Johnson giggle and shimmy by us. Marsha looks at me. Her green eyes sparkle. “Hey, ching-ching-a-ling,” she says as she passes. “Ah-so.”
Diane Johnson looks back, then breaks into a fit of nervous giggles.
I feel as if I’ve been hit in the head with a brick. I turn my back on Marsha so she can’t see my pride collapsing. Expanding tears begin to blur my vision, and I bite my lip until I start to see spots in front of my eyes.
“Bye, Beth,” I say, tilting my head back so the tears can fall back into my eyes. Beth stands there, dazed.
“Wait, Ellen,” she says suddenly. Her bony hand grabs my arm. “I’ll walk out with you.” Beth throws on the rest of her clothes and slings her bag of books onto her shoulder like a shield. The only way out is to pass Marsha and Diane again. They keep preening by their lockers as though there’s nothing going on, but I can feel the tension in the air.
“Ching chong Chinaman,” Marsha says to me as we pass.
“Shut up,” Beth says, glaring at her.
“Hey, you shut up.” Marsha’s shell-pink lips curl back to reveal her Pepsodent-piranha teeth.
I am as dumb as a stone.
“Come on,” Beth says to me. “Let’s leave these imbeciles.”
Marsha makes ching-chonging noises as we leave. I can hear them even when we’re way down the hall. “Fucking ah-so, who does she think she is?” The final echo reaches our ears.
“Are you all right?” Beth asks.
I feel a lump the size of a golf ball forming in my throat. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but why do these stupid names make me cry? I am a quiet person, I don’t make waves. I like Marsha—why is she doing this?
“I think I want to go home,” I manage to say.
“How’re you getting home?” she asks.
“Walking,” I say. “My parents went to Minneapolis for the weekend.”
“At least let my mom give you a ride,” she says, looking at me as if I might break apart and float away at any minute.
I nod. My stomach seems to have fallen into my shoes, and I feel physically sick.
At home, I lie on my bed, staring at the pictures of Mary Lou Retton and Nadia Comaneci that I’d cut out from Gymnast and Life magazine. A few tears squeeze their way out of my eyelids. I had been looking forward to going out tonight, but now I don’t want to go out ever, knowing what Marsha Randall—and probably all those other girls—really think of me. I don’t know how I can go back to gymnastics.
I wonder what Marsha is doing right now. Hanging out at the Pizza Palace? On a date with Tomper?
I guess I could use this time to study rather than mope. I have a sudden realization: I have never seen Marsha’s name on the honor roll. I heard her tell someone once that she wanted to be a dental technician. Maybe when I get my MD, I’ll come back to Arkin to practice, and she’ll end up working for me as a medical secretary. By then she’ll have three kids with Brad Whitlock, and they’ll both be fat. I’ll end up firing her because I’ll decide I want only people with college degrees.
I need to get away, that’s it. Michelle, after all, skipped from Arkin to Cambridge and picked up new friends and even a Korean boyfriend without any stress.
“I was always mad that Mom and Father never sent us to prep school,” she told me once, privately and bitterly over the phone. “The people in Arkin are so ignorant! Nobody respects intelligence; all they care about are parties, looking good, and having sex.”
I’ve always wondered if she was called “chink” in high school, too, but I never got to know. Michelle always hoarded her emotions and snapped at anyone who came too close.
I spread the colorful catalogs on the floor, wishing I could just jump in and see all the colleges and all the people in them. Let’s see, how far away can I get from Marsha Randall, Brad Whitlock, and Mr. Borglund? I scratch Carleton College, which is still in Minnesota, off the list. I grab the nearest catalog, All About Brown, and start reading.
By the time I go to bed, I have narrowed my choices down to three: Harvard, Brown, and Wellesley. Harvard is a given. Brown seems neat because, first, it doesn’t have core course requirements, so maybe I’ll have more room to choose a few English courses with all my science stuff, and second, its combined undergraduate/graduate medical program would be a nice way to take a year off my medical studies. Wellesley is a funny choice because I can’t imagine going to a school of all girls, but it’s the prospect of a total change that makes me interested.
At 5:30 in the morning, the mooing of a battery-operated cow is almost too much. I peer out the dark window. The trees in our yard are gray by the light of the streetlamps, and everything is in suspended animation. I am awake ahead of everyone in Arkin.
Getting up early does wonders for me. In the quiet of the morning, I feel more alert, more creative, smarter. I sit at my desk and open my calc book.
I am afraid of calculus, I have to admit. When I saw that Beth and I were the only girls in the class, I thought that guys must be naturally better in calc and that I had the right to be scared. But then I noticed that Beth was catching on to all the abstract calc concepts as soon as Mr. Carlson explained them, while I had to frantically copy everything down and later sit around for hours trying to decipher it.
All I know for sure is that calc is one of those classes that I need to get an A in to impress Harvard.
When I look up at the clock again, it reads 6:45. I get up and shake my legs.
The pewter morning light is just beginning to make its way through the windows as I head to the bathroom. On the way back, I stop in front of Father’s study.
Father’s study is the only room in the house that has a lock. I guess it’s to keep out the kids, the mom. But I wonder what he does in there all the time, after dinner, on weekends. He doesn’t need a lock just to read.
It’s open now, so I walk in. I’ve never even gotten a good look into this room. Now I go into the center and take the time to stare and stare.
It is lined on two sides by rows of books that reach all the way to the ceiling. One wall is filled with oak-framed medical certificates. Father’s black desk sits, like an island, in the middle of the room.
I sit behind the desk. His chair fits me pretty well because while I’m small, Father is extremely short—the top of his head comes up to Jessie’s dad’s shoulder.
I open one of the side drawers of the desk. Neatly stacked inside are several cellophane packages of those jellied Chuckles candies. Now, why would he be eating Chuckles candy? I know that sometimes he likes to sample “American” things, but when he does, he takes exactly one bite, one package, or whatever, because by and large he finds American food very weird.
I really should leave now, and let this be it. But some inner curiosity gnaws at my empty stomach. What is the story, I want to know. For instance, why are we in Arkin, Minnesota, of all places? When Michelle and I used to ask, Father would say nothing more than “Because there was work here.” He would never tell us what life was like in Korea or why he and Mom left. From what I’ve learned in my history classes, emigrating from a country like Korea wasn’t as simple as deciding to go, packing your bags, and making the reservations on the boat. Did they go through Ellis Island and wave hello to the Statue of Liberty? I want to know all that. I want to know why I’m not like Jessie or Beth or Marsha Randall.
“Maybe they’ll tell us something when we’re older,” Michelle had said after one of those times when we begged Mom and Father to tell us stories about Korea. “If there’s some reason they don’t want to tell us, I’ll respect it.”
I’ve always been the bad daughter, I guess. “Forgive me,” I say out loud to the ghosts of Father’s ancestors, in case they are watching.
In the small file cabinet near his desk, I find a file labeled michelle, and I pull it out. Inside are a bunch of report cards (all As ), a picture of Michelle receiving a national math prize, and acceptance letters from MIT and Yale. In a separate folder in the file lies the crisp parchment of her Harvard acceptance certificate. We are proud to announce that michelle sung has been accepted to the Class of . . . Imagine, Harvard people think their school is so great that they feel you deserve a certificate just for getting in. I’m surprised it’s sitting in here and is not displayed on the wall—or in a museum.
Of course, next to Michelle’s file is mine. I’m not even sure I want to look. It’s about as thick as hers, but I can’t imagine what could be in it. I pull it out and start digging through it.
The same report cards, but with a few Bs in math contaminating them, a picture from the Tribune of me with the gymnastics team—I had no idea Father even noticed that in the paper—and college catalogs from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT. Now, why would he be sending away for this college stuff when it’s supposedly me who’s deciding where I’m going to school? And MIT? Doesn’t he know his own daughter well enough to know that she hates math? What would he say if I went to a small school like Carleton or didn’t go at all? Jessie doesn’t think she’s going to college, and she doesn’t seem too worried about it. I cram the folder back into its place.
I then slide out the skinny middle drawer of the desk; I’ve saved it for last because I always keep my important things in there, and I thought Father might, too. Inside are more paper clips, a letter opener, and a few silver dollars.
There has to be more. Why else would he have a lock on the door? Sniffing like a pack rat, I start to paw around, looking in all the unlikely places I can think of: behind books, under the desk, even behind the medical certificates.
For some reason, I burrow behind his stack of classical records. At first, my hand passes through a gossamer cloud of cobwebs. Then it touches something flat and smooth—a book cover, perhaps. I stick my arm in farther to see if I can get a grip on it.
I pull out two thin scrapbooks, one on top of the other. Underneath the coating of dust, the leather covers are embossed with gold leaf.
I creak open the top one. The first page has a black-and-white photo neatly attached to the yellowing paper with small paste-on photo corners. It’s of a bunch of doctors and nurses standing on the steps of a hospital, Santa Rosa Hospital, according to the sign. As I look more closely, I spot Father right away: he’s the shortest and the only Oriental person. If I take him out of the picture, this could be a snapshot of a sitcom called Surfing Doctors, or something like that. Everyone looks so carefree, and those scrub suits could be surfer jams and the women in the cat-eyed glasses could be the bopping girlfriends in bikinis. Then there’s Father, off to the side in his spectacles and his somber look, as if he’s on the wrong set.
I remember Father mentioning that he briefly interned at a hospital in Southern California. This must be the one.
When I turn to the next page, a folded newspaper clipping slips out. I have to keep my fingers as light as feathers to unfold the sepia-toned paper without ripping it to shreds.
Young Korean Émigré Finds New Life in the US, reads the headline.
Dr. Victor Sung almost had his life ended in the war—before he ever set foot on American soil.
My eyes bulge as I read. This is Father? And what war?
A young intern originally from Pyongyang, North Korea, Sung was hit by shrapnel from a bomb dropped near the barracks.
“Yes, I was very lucky,” said Sung, displaying the cross-shaped scar on his forehead. According to the surgeon who operated on him, the wound would have killed Sung had it been even as little as half an inch deeper.
Shrapnel? Killed? Father never mentioned anything about being in a war. And I never noticed any war wounds, although his forehead is already a map of wrinkles and crevices.
As I read on, the article details how Father, and presumably Mom, emigrated to the US and how Father landed an internship at Santa Rosa Hospital in California. The article goes on about Father’s “outstanding” work in surgical research. Why did he give it up, I wonder, for some small-town practice?
I turn to the next page of the album and find a very worn picture that looks almost as if it has gone through the wash: it’s been creased and wrinkled so many times that it feels soft, like cloth. It is of a pretty Korean woman in a striped gown—which I’m sure was all sorts of vivid colors—holding a moonfaced boy, and there are a few solemn-looking men, also in costume, with funny T-shaped hats, in the background. No one is smiling—Father’s expression. Maybe these are Father’s relatives.
Another picture is of Mom in her wedding gown. She looks so young! Like a schoolgirl in a simple white dress. Is it possible that she had a crush on Father the way I have a crush on Tomper? But Mom and Father are so reserved that I can’t imagine it.
Caught in the binding of that page is a glossy square of paper about as big as my palm; it looks as if it’s been stuck in the binding for I don’t know how long. On one side, it’s just a patch of pink. On the other side, it has a picture of a lady in an old-fashioned pointy bra; she is holding a pack of cigarettes, and the words Smoke___, it’s nicer rise in a bubble from her mouth. The scrap falls out of my hands, and for a minute I consider letting it remain on the floor, but I notice that it’s torn out in a nice, neat square. I carefully tuck it back into place.
That’s the first book.
I open the second one to find a cache of airmail letters, all in Korean, wedged inside the cover. I unfold the crisp aerograms and just stare at them. It’s such a hex not knowing Korean—a whole part of me is not there.
I remember that when I was younger, I found some Korean children’s books that had colorful pictures of butterflies and Korean kids in pigtails. The book was chock-full of Korean writing, so I copied some of the squashed-bug symbols and showed them to Mom. “‘I want to go home, I want to go home.’” She’d laughed, reading my handwriting. Excitedly, I copied more and more and kept bringing them to her. Finally, she said, “No, Ellen. English is your language.” And she wouldn’t tell me about the squashed-bug symbols anymore. I still took the books into the closet and read them by flashlight—staring and staring at the symbols until they burned themselves into my retina. But the meanings never came.
Light is now streaming through the windows in Father’s study, and I feel exposed, like a criminal, a vampire. I carefully replace the albums where I found them, and walk out of the room backward, making sure that it looks the same as before I entered. It does.
Well, folks, I just took my sentimental journey to the center of the earth.