The night begins with Lenny’s father, Yul, sitting in his lounge chair, a tall glass of whiskey on the armrest. He listens to the large stereo under the TV, the turntable encased in an ornate oak cabinet that required three muscular and sweaty men to carry into the house. The Chang family moved here from New York City, from a small dingy apartment on 110th—in between Central Park and East Harlem—to Merrick, Long Island, a commuter town with a railroad station high up on a concrete platform. Yul wanted a house—he had talked on many occasions about his dream to have his own yard, and the privacy they had never had in the various apartments they’d lived in. So he took out a huge mortgage, one that would oppress him for years, especially as his jobs became precarious.
Yul sips Jack Daniel’s first from his tall glass, the caramel brown color reminding Lenny of furniture polish, but eventually he drinks straight from the bottle. The strong alcohol smell wafts through the house. The record on the stereo is Prokofiev, Peter and the Wolf, which he bought for his children but ends up listening to himself.
Lenny tries to stay in his bedroom, pacing, occasionally doing push-ups or sit-ups, stretching on the cool wooden floor. It’s too late to go out, too early to go to sleep. He knows his father is getting drunk, and can hear the low mumblings that mark the beginning of a bad night. Yul talks to himself when he drinks, and although Lenny can’t understand Korean, he can easily interpret the rumblings of an unhappy man.
He checks on his younger sister, Mira, who is seven. She’s small and frail with chubby cheeks. She has a page-boy haircut with sharp bangs, and hugs herself when she’s scared, as she is this particular night. She sits cross-legged in her room with her books and looks up at Lenny with wide, uncertain eyes. She blinks, waiting for him to say something. She tilts her head toward the living room, listening to their father bark something angrily.
Lenny says, “You stink.” He shuts the door and hears her sigh.
He returns to his bedroom and plays with his knife collection. Mostly penknives, a few lock blades, and a couple of Swiss Army knives, the collection is part of his secret stash of weapons. He also has Chinese throwing stars; three homemade nunchucks with various chain lengths; a pair of homemade tonfas, small L-shaped clubs; brass knuckles; and a half dozen staffs in his closet. He bought the Chinese throwing stars and brass knuckles through mail order, a recent discovery. Although at eleven years old he’s too young to have a checking account, he learned how to buy a money order from the Post Office, and began receiving martial arts catalogs from around the world. He earns money by raking leaves and shoveling snow.
He wants throwing knives. He wants switchblade knives. He wants sais, thin Chinese daggers, and, of course, ninja swords. These he will have to save up for. He also orders tae kwon do and kung-fu instruction books. He practices by himself in the backyard every day. He even made a punching bag out of a rice sack and old rags, and it hangs off a beam in the boiler room.
He hears his father mumbling louder. Then he hears him bellowing, “What are you looking at?” At first Lenny supposes this is his usual ramblings, but then he hears Mira say in a quiet, frightened voice, “I wanted to get some water.”
“Then get it.”
Lenny hurries out, walking quickly past the living room, glancing at his father, who stands by the window and stares out onto the darkened front lawn. His broad back is hunched, his left hand holding the bottle loosely in his fingers, his right fist resting on the window frame. The music scratches out of the speakers, crackles layered over symphonic strings, and Yul sways to the rhythm.
In the kitchen Mira stands by the open refrigerator, gripping the pale yellow door with grease stains along the handle. The smell of kimchi eases out, because their mother ferments the cabbage in large jars in the back of the fridge. White packs of tofu in water jiggle as Mira reaches up for a bottle of soda. They hear their father speak sharply in Korean. Mira pauses. She doesn’t want to return through the living room, but it’s the only way back to the bedrooms. She remains frozen, her arm still extending up to the top shelf.
“Do you want water or not?” Lenny asks.
She shakes her head quickly.
“Soda?”
She shakes her head again.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I’m not thirsty anymore.”
“You’re wasting the cold air.”
Their father calls to them, telling them to come to the living room. They look at each other.
Lenny and Mira walk out to the living room, where their father totters drunkenly by the sofa. His eyes are half-closed, his arms floating in front of him. He says, “I don’t like secret talking. You hide in the kitchen and secret talk. What are you talking about?”
Lenny replies, “What to drink.”
“Where is your mother?”
“Church.”
“Always secret talk. I am tired of it. Talk talk talk. Everyone lies to me! Why do you all lie?”
Mira steps back and looks at Lenny, frightened.
Their father picks up the whiskey bottle from the table and hurls it toward the fireplace, the bottle spiraling across the living room, and it clanks sharply against the brick, bounces off and slides and spins across the carpet. He laughs, and begins dancing to the music, shifting back and forth on his feet, his hands extended in front of him like a marionette’s. A sheen of sweat covers his mottled red forehead. He sings in a hoarse, monotone voice, “Secret talk! Secret talk! Everybody lies to me and gives secret talk!”
Mira bursts into tears. Their father stops dancing. He glares at her and says “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
She shakes her head, unable to speak.
Lenny says, “You’re scaring her!”
“You b-be quiet!” he yells, which only makes Mira cry more.
“Go to your rooms!”
“What did we do?” Lenny asks.
Their father rears up, and Lenny knows better than to argue. He grabs his sister’s thin arm and pulls her down the hall. She sniffles and wipes her nose.
Lenny says, “Stop that.”
“I can’t.”
He leads her to her room and tells her to read. She nods her head. They hear their father rambling to himself again, and Lenny closes her door softly.
His mother isn’t at church, but at sok-keh, or bible study. Lenny usually clumps his mother’s religious activities around this time into one gibbering, incomprehensible mess. That she latches onto Christianity is understandable, given her unhappy and miserable marriage. She goes to church on Sundays and prayer meetings once or twice a week, and Lenny once accidentally stumbles upon one at their house. He hears them before seeing anything—the mumbling prayers in Korean slowly rising in intensity as he walks through the back door and wonders what’s going on. The voices are all women, all in Korean, and have a chanting sing-song quality that makes his neck tingle with unease. He creeps toward the living room and peers around the corner. His mother and five other women sit in a circle, bibles on their laps, their heads bowed and bobbing. Their eyes are closed and they mumble their prayers aloud, a few voices cracking with emotion.
Lenny stares at his mother, who seems to be pleading to God. He never knows precisely what she says, but he has a good idea of where her anguish lies.
She’s in her mid-thirties, pale and gaunt, and has a Jackie-O hairdo that’s sprayed stiff, a style she won’t change for decades. She’s small, thin and energetic, and she practices yoga long before yoga is popular. Lenny often sees her doing Downward Dog on the carpet, reminding him of a stretching cat. She also does strange eye, tongue, and breathing exercises that are supposed to strengthen her chi.
Lenny’s memories begin in Merrick, Long Island. When he thinks about his childhood he thinks of Merrick. They live in a large, three bedroom house on William Place, across the street from a Presbyterian church, a block away from the Long Island Railroad station.
The railroad station is particularly memorable. Lenny stands on the station platform, looking out over his town, and he flattens pennies and nickels on the railroad tracks. The warped coins remind him of copper moths.
The train tracks sit on huge concrete structures, smooth and grey and bright in the afternoon sun. Often, after school, when Lenny avoids the bus and walks the three miles along Sunrise Highway, he’ll climb up the concrete steps to the top of the station and take in the view.
Although his house is one block away from the station, the church obstructs his view of his street. However, he can see his favorite climbing tree, a maple with a U-shaped branch near the top that fits his back perfectly—so perfectly that he often falls asleep in the branch, awakening with a jerk to find himself twenty feet off the ground.
To the south: his house, more neighborhoods shrouded under leafy trees and utility poles with webbed telephone and electrical wires crisscrossing the streets. To the north: mini-malls, auto shops and small warehouses.
Up here on the platform blue, rippled, plastic wind guards separate the east- and westbound benches. Posters of movies and Broadway shows rattle in the wind. Beyond the blue dividers is a small indoor waiting room with Plexiglas windows scratched and spray-painted with graffiti. Payphones stand at each main column. A few people linger up here, waiting for the next train, but it’s usually quiet before rush hour.
The afternoons are a perfect time to explore the platform, and Lenny discovers the joy of flattening pennies. He has to jump down onto the tracks, which always unnerves him because it’s a five-foot drop, and he often has trouble shimmying his way back up to the platform. Once, when he first started doing this, he saw the train lights in the distance and almost panicked, his hands sweating and slipping off the edge.
The pennies are flattened and scraped shiny, sometimes even twisted into artful shapes. They glint in the sun. He once threw a handful into the air and watched them twinkle down to the street below.
During one of these penny-flattening sessions he tries to use the coins in the payphone, tricking it to give him cheap calls. But the uneven edges cause the flat penny to jam in the slot. He dials the operator and tells her that his coin is stuck, and she offers to credit his home telephone number for the loss of the coin. He doesn’t want to give her his real number, but he says that all he wants to do is make a call.
“You can make a collect call. What’s the number?”
Lenny isn’t sure what number to give, so offers his home number but changes the last few digits. When the operator connects to the line, she asks him what his name is.
“William,” he says, trying to deepen his voice, thinking of his street name.
The man on the other line says, “William? William who?”
Lenny hangs up. He stands there for a while, wondering whom else he can call collect, impressed by this discovery of free calls. But he can’t think of anyone. He has no friends.
Lenny is being punished for losing Yul’s slide ruler—Lenny had used it as a toy and misplaced it—and his punishment had initially been to run around the backyard one hundred times. Minor infractions resulted in this common penalty, but when Lenny begins walking and even resting against a tree and Yul sees him, Yul has already started his nightly ritual with Jack Daniel’s.
Yul opens the back door and stands on the steps, staring. He is a barrel-chested blunt man with once muscular arms that have become flabby with age. When he’s drunk his face flushes and his usual solid stance wavers, as it does now, and he yells at Lenny to continue running.
Lenny does.
Watching his son with disgust and disappointment, Yul says, “Look how slow you are! Feet up! B-Body straight!” He has a severe stutter that recedes when he’s drunk.
Lenny sweats, his thighs burning, but he runs faster. Yul continues to taunt Lenny, who glances up at the kitchen window, where his mother watches from the sink. Her expression is shrouded by the shadows from the young maple tree by the window, but he can sense her familiar concern.
Finally, too exhausted, and long having lost count, Lenny slows down. Yul barks at him to continue, but he can’t. He begins walking, and this only sets Yul off more. He hurries down the steps toward Lenny, and Umee rushes to the back door. Yul grabs Lenny’s neck and shoves him forward, ordering him to run, but Lenny tells him he can’t. He’s too tired.
Yul mutters in Korean, and then says in English, “You’ve been babied too much and are too weak.” He points to Lenny’s skinny, pale arms. “Can you even do a pull-up? A simple pull-up?” Yul frowns. “Do a pull-up right now.” He motions to the swing set that a neighbor had given him years ago; the lime green paint has been overtaken by rust, the swings broken, and neither Lenny nor Mira ever play near this.
Yul pushes him toward the swing set and again orders him to do a pull-up. Lenny reaches for the side bar that’s chest high, and he hangs down on it, his feet dragging. But his father tells him to use the top bar.
“How?” Lenny asks.
“Climb up it.”
Lenny tries, but flakes of rust dig into his hand, and he whines, “It hurts.”
“You must be tougher. This world is too hard on the weak. Get on the b-b-bar!”
When Yul sees his son struggling, he lifts Lenny up easily. Lenny grabs the top of the swing set, but as soon as his father releases him Lenny feels the rust digging into his hands and he lets go.
He falls to the ground, hard, and cries out. He then lies still, breathing in the cool, dewy grass scent.
Umee yells at her husband in Korean. He turns to her and stares without speaking. Umee freezes, and after a moment of his full attention, she looks away. Yul then hoists Lenny back up and orders him to hold on. The rust flakes cut into Lenny’s palm and he whimpers. Yul stands behind Lenny and says, “Do not let go. You must be strong.”
Lenny’s grip loosens, but Yul moves closer behind him and presses a finger into his back, saying, “Don’t.”
Lenny’s vision blurs, his hands stinging, and he feels his shoulders aching. The jabbing finger hurts his back. Lenny lets go of one hand, and Yul says, “Stay on!”
Lenny latches his hands back on, tightly, and feels more cuts in his fingers and palms, and cries out, “It hurts!”
“Stay on!”
But then Lenny falls to the ground, collapsing into a ball, and he cradles his stinging, aching hands. His father nudges his back with his slipper, the toe digging into Lenny’s shoulder blade, and Yul says something in Korean, his tone laced with disgust. Lenny’s mother runs to him, yelling at his father, who turns and lumbers away.
“Come, Lenny,” his mother says quietly, helping him up.
“My hands,” he says, shocked by the little beads of blood. “My hands.”
“Come inside.”
Lenny stares at the blood, at the tiny specks of rust in his palm, and then, finally, begins to cry.
His mother hushes him, telling him it will be fine. She spends thirty minutes plucking out the rust splinters with tweezers, his sobbing muted only by his fascination with the way his blood stains the blotted paper towel, turning it pink. His mother, feigning a smile, tells him his favorite folktale about a bear and a tiger to distract him, but he stares at the blood, mesmerized.
Umee’s experiences upon arriving in the U.S. were traumatic. She came to Boston alone for graduate school, knowing no one. She was supposed to stay with a host family, one set up by the school, but the first night she stayed there the husband crept into her room and tried to rape her. She screamed and scared him away, and immediately left the house. She had nowhere to go. She tried the local YWCA, which was fully booked, and it appeared as if she was going to be homeless until she broke down and begged the YWCA administrator for anything, even a sofa. Finally, they found her a bed, and the next day she had to beg another administrator, this one at the Northeastern University Housing and Residential Life offices, to help her find somewhere new to live.
She was terrified of this country, of starting over here after fleeing her discontented life in Seoul, which included an annulled marriage, the circumstances of which were mildly scandalous: the groom’s physical and sexual handicaps had not been revealed to her until after the arranged marriage. She tells this and many other stories about herself to Lenny when he’s a child; he suffers from severe hay fever and is often unable to sleep. She sits on his bed and talks about everything. He becomes her confidant, even as a child too young to understand everything.
But these were the conditions his mother suffered under when she arrived here, and she cried herself to sleep every night for two weeks. And it isn’t too hard to understand why, when she began receiving letters from Yul, a man she’d never met but whose mother knew her mother—it isn’t too difficult to see why Umee found comfort with a Korean man also studying in the U.S., a man who had also been married. He had a baby son whom he had shipped off to Korea. His ex-wife abandoned both him and her baby boy, and Yul was lonely and depressed.
His letters to her were affectionate, even loving. He had learned about her from his mother, and both mothers were conspiring to bring them together. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to be married again. He would take care of her, he promised. They would be a happy family.
Rumors about Yul’s marriage worked its way to Umee, as a woman abandoning a newborn baby was gossip that moved swiftly through the small ex-pat Korean community. Umee had even known about the ex-wife when she was a student in Korea—they had gone to the same high school, just two grades apart.
However, Umee didn’t know the extent of the violence, the abuse, the drinking.
All she knew was that she was alone in a frightening foreign country, and the soothing words of the man in New York gave her hope.
Both of Lenny’s parents work fulltime, his father a computer programmer and his mother a small-business owner. Lenny’s mother runs a candy store. You would think a kid with a mother who owns a candy store would be something wonderful, but really, the strongest memory Lenny has about the store is her getting robbed.
It happens around the same time Lenny learns about free collect calls. In fact, he probably learns about the robbery after coming home from the train station with more flattened coins. He wants to make something out of them, possibly a necklace for his mother. He adds the new coins to his jam jar and then prepares for his martial arts training. He has an old tae kwon do manual that’s written in Korean, but the photos and drawings are all he needs. He also has Kung-fu books, and tries to combine the kicks of tae kwon do with the hand and fist styles of Kung-fu. He brings his books out into the back yard and starts his stretches. He practices the forms—prescribed sequences of punches and kicks that he memorized from the books—and then works on the various kicks and hand strikes.
They have two large trees in the back yard—a tall oak and a young maple—and he uses the young maple trunk as a target, attacking it with various kicking and punching combinations, though being careful not to cut his knuckles. He tries to emulate some of the sound effects from the Saturday afternoon kung-fu movies on channel 5. He loves these poorly dubbed Shaw Brothers imports so much that he records them on an audio cassette and listens to them when he goes to bed, imagining the scenes that correspond with the dialogue. The sound effects, with the thwacks and crashes amidst the yelling and grunting, help him envision the movie again.
After Lenny hits the tree until his knuckles and feet hurt, he does push-ups, jumping jacks, and sit-ups. By the time he walks into the house he finds his father sitting in his lounge chair with the TV news on. Yul still has on his dress slacks and button-down shirt, the collar open and the sleeves rolled up.
“Where is your mother?” he asks Lenny.
Lenny says he doesn’t know.
“Is she at the store?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
Lenny pauses. “She’s usually home by now.”
His father grunts and pulls himself up, walking to the kitchen telephone. Lenny hears the rotary dial clicking, and after a moment his father speaks in Korean. The conversation is brief, and he hangs up quickly. He rushes to the closet to get his coat and tells Lenny to watch his sister.
“What happened?”
“Where is your brother?” Yul asks.
“I don’t know.”
“We will be back later.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“The store was robbed. Make your sister dinner. We will be late.”
He leaves through the front door, which is surprising. They always use the back door, and as Lenny wonders about this anomaly, the news settles in. Robbed.
Sweets ‘N Gifts, the small candy store, is in Bellmore, the next town over. This was Yul’s idea, setting up a business for his wife to run now that all the kids go to school. Both believe in the American dream of owning their own business, and Yul was especially eager for his wife to start a store that would make them self-sufficient. Instead of a grocery or liquor store, the usual Korean immigrant start-ups, they decided on a candy and small gift store that dealt not in the prepackaged, mass-produced candy the supermarkets sold, but in the old-fashioned loose variety that Umee sold out of large jars with shiny tin covers, weighing and bagging whatever the customer pointed to: rock candies, licorice sticks, lemon drops, and Swedish fish.
The store is in a small commercial strip mall next to a large hardware warehouse, and never has customers. They are losing a lot of money, and it’s making their already embattled marriage worse, since Umee blames Yul for the bad idea, and Yul blames Umee for the poor execution.
When Ed comes home for dinner and finds that their parents aren’t here he tells Lenny that he’s going back out.
Lenny says, “Mom was robbed.”
Ed stops. “Is she okay?” He’s getting even more muscular, his biceps and chest stretching his old, thin T-shirt. His head looks oddly small. He once told Lenny that he started lifting weights a few years ago to be able to take on their father.
“I don’t know,” Lenny replies.
“I’ll be back later.” Ed then disappears through the garage. Lenny has only had glimpses of his brother like this for the past couple of years, and he once heard Ed tell his friends that he was going to get as far away from this house as he could after high school. Their father has always been hard on him, and when they all sat together for dinner he lectured and berated Ed for not being a better student.
Mira appears in the living room as soon as Ed leaves and asks what’s happening. When Lenny tells her she asks, “Was Mom killed?”
“No! Are you crazy?” But then Lenny isn’t so sure.
“I wrote a book. Look.” She shows him a book titled Me that she had typed and stapled in between cardboard covers. An “About the Author” section is on the back, with her photo. Lenny is impressed, but also distracted. He tells her, “If Mom is dead, you’re going to an orphanage.”
She blinks, taking this in.
“Back to the orphanage,” he adds. “You know you were adopted, right?”
“What?”
As soon as he sees that she considers this a possibility, he spins a story about how their mother couldn’t have another baby, so they all went to the orphanage to choose a new one. “You were still a baby, crying and everything. We picked you because you look sort of like me and Mom. Maybe you should write a book about that.”
Mira takes her book and wanders back to her room, considering this. Lenny thinks of more ways to torment her, but then wonders if their mother really is dead.
When their parents return home a few hours later, his mother is pale and shaky. Her usually neat hair is disheveled, tufts sticking out. She sits unsteadily at the kitchen table while his father pours them both a drink—whiskey on ice—and she remains subdued. Yul explains that someone came in at closing with a gun and took all the money. The police were there for a while, taking the report.
None of this feels real until Lenny’s mother cries for a moment, just a quick sniffle, her face crumpling, and then she shakes this off and sips her drink, the ice clinking. Their father is already on his second glass, this one with no ice, and says something to her in Korean, which makes her face flush. She retorts something harsh, and he stares at her coldly, then mutters something. He takes his glass and the bottle to the living room.
She looks at Lenny and says, “I’m okay.”
“What happened?”
She waits a moment, then tells him that a young man, possibly a teenager, with large sunglasses, came in, pulled out a gun and ordered her to give him all her cash. She had eighty dollars in the register. He then told her to get into the back closet, and he shoved a chair under the door handle. She waited a few minutes then broke out and called the police.
“That’s all?” Lenny asks.
“He could’ve shot me,” she says.
“Oh.”
“We will install a special alarm tomorrow.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
She sighs. “I don’t know. Go to bed, Lenny.”
He returns to his room, passing his father, who stares angrily at the TV news. The smoldering expression on his face means that he’s not finished with his wife, and Lenny prepares for a fight.
It begins with low, sharp murmurs in Korean, their voices modulated because they are aware of their children in the house, but as the fight escalates, with the see-sawing dynamic of Yul retreating to the living room and Umee following him and arguing, and then Umee running into the kitchen with Yul following, they soon forget about the kids and yell at each other in their loudest voices.
Lenny isn’t sure what they’re saying. Their parents never taught him Korean, and because of speech problems from his cleft palate, a speech pathologist recommended that they speak only English to him. Korean, then, became the language of fighting.
The argument goes on for another forty minutes, and it sounds as if Yul blames Umee for not trying to fight to keep the money. Lenny hears English words sprinkled in, and infers meanings from their tones. Umee accuses him of wanting her dead. The fight quiets down, and then kicks up again a couple of hours later as Yul becomes more drunk. They shift from arguing about money to venting and cursing. Lenny recognizes the Korean curses, the “shangs” and the “michin nyuns” spat at each other. Then he hears his father hitting his mother – a slap, a cry of pain, more yelling, and crying.
His father chases his mother through the house, their steps heavy, his mother wheezing in fear. The floor and walls shake with their steps, and his mother’s lighter, quicker footsteps run down the hall and toward his room. She leaps in and locks the door. His father crashes into the door, bellowing in Korean, and bangs his fists for a minute, but, exhausted, he eventually retreats to the living room. They hear glass clinking, the TV going off, and the stereo turning on.
Lenny sits up in his bed. His mother stands in the middle of the room, her fists pressed against her stomach. He smells the familiar mixture of her sweat and his father’s alcohol. She sees him in the darkness and tells him to go back to sleep, but his heart beats quickly and he remembers how once his father had once almost crashed through the door. His mother tells him again to go to sleep. He lies down, and reaches under his pillow, holding onto his favorite pair of nunchucks. He made these from an old broomstick, fish-eye screws and a chain from the hardware store. The feeling of them in his hands is reassuring, and he hears his mother lower herself to the floor, waiting until his father passes out. After a few minutes his heartbeat slows and he relaxes into his pillow. He hears his mother sighing.
Lenny falls asleep with the sounds of classical music floating in from the living room.
Lenny has Speech Therapy every Thursday afternoon. He and three other kids from different grades show up at a small office near the Janitor’s room where they sit at a tiny table with a young speech therapist, Ms. Feinberg, whose perky and enthusiastic demeanor helps yank them out of their post-lunch torpor. She has shelves of toys and devices, including a blue bubble head-piece that funnels their voices directly to their ears, so that they can hear their voices acutely, but Lenny doesn’t like what he hears. He has a nasal, high-pitched voice that embarrasses him, and Ms. Feinberg tries to teach him to block off the airflow to his nose when he speaks. It’s difficult. The cleft palate he was been born with had been minor—only the soft palate had been split—but it had been enough to render that muscle useless, so he has a lot of “leakage.” Hard consonants come out soft. Sometimes he sounds better when he has a cold and his nose is stuffed up.
The other kids have different problems, lisps and stutters, but they are all similarly frustrated with the exercises and lessons. They are also similarly embarrassed by their disabilities, and they rarely talk to each other. They certainly don’t acknowledge each other outside of this room. Once, when Ms. Feinberg was late, they stood outside the door silently, not even looking at each other.
This session Ms. Feinberg rips up small pieces of tissue, places them on a piece of cardboard, and holds this up to Lenny’s nose. She tells him to say, “Sally sells seashells by the seashore.” He does this, and the air from his nose moves the tissue pieces. Ms. Feinberg instructs him to practice this now without moving the tissues. “Don’t let air out through your nose.”
Lenny tries, but the leakage keeps fluttering the tissue pieces. She gives the others different tasks. One of the kids, the stutterer, has to recite the same line but with a wooden tongue depressor in his mouth. He stutters over the line and almost gags. The two lispers also repeat the line, but with the bubble head-piece on, the light blue plastic making them look like astronauts. All of them now recite the line, out of sync, in monotones, and it has the chanting quality of Lenny’s mother’s bible study group.
After school Lenny waits patiently for Mira, because he promised he’d walk home with her. She appears at the entrance with an armload of books, her blue sweater buttoned crookedly, and he tells her that it’s a long way with all those books. “You should take the bus.”
“But it left already!”
Lenny loads half of the books into his back pack, and starts walking. She hurries after him, asking him to wait up.
Lenny has already explored the neighborhoods during his roaming lunch periods, when he’d eat the cold leftovers his mother packed for him, and he’d wander farther and farther from the school grounds. Sometimes the crows would see him, and he’d throw them pieces of Korean barbecued beef, the fat congealed white and cold. They’d swarm down and fight for it. Then they’d follow him, flying from telephone pole to telephone pole, watching and waiting.
As Mira and Lenny walk along side streets he spots someone from his grade, Frankie, a hulking overweight slob who picks on the younger kids. He munches a bag of Doritos while walking, and when he sees them he holds the bag in his mouth and pulls his eyes slanted. He yells with the bag still in his teeth, “Ching chong chinaman!”
Mira turns to Lenny, who shakes his head and continues walking. Frankie yells it again, but this time drops his bag of Doritos, the chips spreading across the sidewalk, and he curses. Mira laughes. Frankie looks up venomously.
Lenny whispers to his sister to shut up and keep walking.
Frankie yells to Lenny, “You’re gonna pay for that!”
Mira looks confused. “Why do you have to pay for that?”
Lenny yanks her along, saying, “You just got me in trouble.”
“Oh.”
“Now he’s going to pick on me.”
“I didn’t know!” she cries.
“Come on.”
She follows him home contritely.
Lenny practices saying, “Sally sells seashells at the seashore,” muttering to himself while trying to keep the leakage down.
“What?” Mira asks.
He repeats it quietly.
“Who’s Sally? What are you talking about?”
He looks directly at her and says, “Sally sells seashells at the seashore.”
Mira sighs. “You’re weird.”
Sweets ‘N Gifts is on Merrick Road, a busy highway with no bike lane, so Lenny has to ride on the sidewalk. A mix of storefronts and office buildings line the street, and he weaves around annoyed pedestrians. Twenty minutes later he approaches his mother’s store, which looks very out of place nestled between the Emerald Bar and Carpets for Less. A large hardware depot looms nearby, and most of the other businesses here—a linoleum and flooring outlet, a mattress store—are connected to home and building supplies.
Lenny drops his bicycle in front of the store and walks in, a small bell ringing. His mother leans on the front counter, reading a large annotated bible. She looks up, startled. “Lenny?” she asks. “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting.”
“You rode all the way here?”
He nods and looks around. She has added more jewelry in the front display cases, silver and jade earrings and necklaces and small jewelry boxes sit on shelves next to silver seagull mobiles and figurines. The collection is eclectic and puzzling to Lenny, since the jars of candy lined up behind the counter have nothing to do with jewelry, and customers who want one wouldn’t really want the other. He stares at the mobiles hanging near the front. The afternoon sun shines through the tinted front window and hits the sparkling stars.
“Do you want some candy?” she asks.
Strangely enough he doesn’t. When the store first opened, Lenny tried the different varieties, but he preferred sour candies, which she doesn’t carry. His brother and sister like the myriad of chocolates, but Lenny doesn’t seem to have the same sweet tooth. He takes a sweet rock candy just because he might regret later not having something.
She shows him the alarm button, just a doorbell button under the counter that buzzes the carpet store next door in case of an emergency. Without thinking, Lenny presses it. Lenny’s mother yells, “Don’t!” and he jumps away. She turns to the door, waiting. She explains that the owner is supposed to come here to help her if she buzzes.
But after a few minutes of silence, she wonders aloud if he didn’t hear it. She tells him to go play in back, and never to press the button again. Lenny wanders past the shelves along the walls, more wiry desk mobiles with glittering gulls rocking and swaying.
He pushes through a beaded curtain and stops at the sight of the back closet. A folding chair from their kitchen stands by the door. This must have been the chair the robber had used to trap his mother in the closet. Lenny peers out through the beaded curtain and sees her checking the panic button, following the wire along the counter and into the wall.
She turns and says to him, “I think it’s okay.”
“You were in the back closet?”
She nods her head. “Your father wants me to have a gun here.”
Lenny wonders if his father has a gun at the house. “Are you going to?” he asks.
“No.”
“Your father used to be a soldier. Didn’t you know that?”
“The navy.”
She looks at him for a moment, and says, “He was a commando.”
“What’s that?”
She tells him the story: Not too long ago, when they had gone to the Korean church in Flushing, Queens, a man took her aside and asked if she knew who her husband was. “Who my husband is?” she asked. “Of course I do.” “No, who your husband was,” he replied. She wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but he explained that he was a former commando with the South Korean Navy. He had recognized her husband. Umee, suddenly understanding that something bad was about to come out of this man’s mouth, didn’t want to know anything and stopped him. Later, though, as she kept thinking about it, imagining all kinds of possibilities, she had to know. She looked up the man in the church directory and called the man’s wife. Then, after talking with him, she learned that her husband Yul was infamous. He had been in the special forces, in an elite commando unit that interrogated enemy soldiers. Yul outshined everyone in his unit, but he had a reputation for cruelty, especially for murdering the prisoners.
Lenny listens to this story, incredulous. “Dad?” he asks.
She replies, “Other soldiers knew about him and were scared of him.”
“Really?”
She nods her head. She studies him, waiting for more of a reaction.
Lenny asks, “How many people did he kill?”
The fact is that Lenny can easily imagine his father shooting someone. He had once seen his father look coldly at his mother and smack her in the face without blinking. Lenny was only five years old, maybe even younger, and the brutality of the act hadn’t surprised him as much as the efficiency and speed, and how emotionless his father had seemed.
“Does he know martial arts?” Lenny asks.
“Maybe,” she replies. “Do you want to stay a while? I can drive you.”
“I have to practice.”
“You’re going to ride your bike all the way home?”
“It’s not far,” he says, seeing the open bible on the counter. He knows she’s bored and lonely, but there isn’t much for him to do here. He walks toward the door, and she asks him what he wants for dinner. “Anything you want,” she says.
“Bibimbap.” It’s a mixed rice, vegetable and beef dish.
“Okay!” she says. She waves to him as he leaves the store, the bell on the handle jangling.
As he rides home, he keeps thinking about his father as a killer.
This is what Lenny knows about his father, Yul: Raised in a turbulent household in North Korea before the Communist takeover, Yul was the second of four children—he had three sisters and a brother. Yul’s father was, among other things, a drug smuggler who often disappeared for weeks, and sometimes Yul would have to track him down.
Yul once told the family a story about how his father had made an opium run into China, and Yul, only a teen, had to sneak into China to find him. Yul’s mother had ordered him to bring his father back. Yul eventually found his father and helped him smuggle opium back into Korea.
Lenny learns from his mother that Yul and his brother had been beaten by their father, and had a miserable childhood. Yul’s younger brother confirmed this once when he visited, and told Umee how they used to have chores on the farm that often kept them working ten hours a day. When the war broke out, Yul ran away from home and enlisted in the South Korean Navy by lying about his age. His family escaped to the south, but he didn’t stay very close to them. After the war he emigrated to the U.S. on a student visa to study computers and finance, and married Ed’s mother. After she abandoned both of them, he sent Ed to Korea, to stay for more than four years. When he married Umee, Ed returned to the states and Umee accepted him as her own. Lenny was born a couple of years later.
Lenny has a trail of clues that confirms bits and pieces of his father’s history. The pucker wound on his leg is supposedly an old football injury, but now Lenny is certain it’s a bullet wound. He first noticed the scarred hole on his father’s thigh when he watched his father mow the lawn, and when he asked about it Yul explained that someone had kicked him during a football game. But a kick, no matter how violent, wouldn’t give someone a pucker scar like that.
That Yul has a military background is obvious. On weekend mornings he awakens the family by opening all the windows, even in the winter, barking at them that they need the fresh morning air. If he had a bugle they would undoubtedly have morning reveille.
He keeps his shoes meticulously polished and lined up in his closet. He teaches Ed and Lenny the intricate method of shoe shining—the proper stages of brushing, cleaning and polishing—and occasionally slips them a few dollars to shine his shoes for him, as long as their work “passes inspection.”
And he’s obsessed with his children being weak. This seems to be a fault far worse than any other, even being lazy, of which he often accuses Ed. Weakness is unpardonable. Physical, mental and emotional weakness are all related, in his estimation, and despite being a child, Lenny isn’t allowed to show any kind of frailty.
One summer evening Lenny whines about the water being too cold at Newbridge Pool. Yul says Lenny should be able to take it, and he orders Lenny in. Afterwards Lenny complains about the shower being too hot, and his father whips the towel at him and says he’s too babied. He needs to be tougher. This only makes Lenny whine louder. When he almost throws a tantrum, his father tells the rest of the family they will be leaving without Lenny.
Lenny has only his bathing suit and flip-flops. His father grabs his bag and leaves the pool. When Lenny tries to follow his father pushes him back, and says, “You act like a baby. You learn to take care of yourself.”
Lenny watches from the gate. His father orders the rest of the family into the white Dodge Dart, and Mira keeps looking back in confusion. He sees her asking their mother, “What about Lenny?” But they climb into the car. Umee yells at Yul, but they drive away. Mira presses her face against the rear window, looking back in alarm. Lenny sits down near the gate, not sure what he is supposed to do. He doesn’t even have his street clothes with him.
It’s getting cold. Lenny wraps himself in the towel and huddles on a chair, suddenly hungry. Families begin packing up and leaving, and only a few groups of teens are still in the water. The night lights flicker on, the pool glowing. Lenny stares up at a large bug zapper near one of the lights—the sparks fascinate him, since he knows the bugs are being electrocuted. After a while he walks back to the gate, expecting someone to be waiting, but no one is there. It takes about an hour for him to realize that his father was serious. He wonders where he will sleep. A few families eat in the food court, the smell of burgers and fries making him hungrier.
After two hours he walks back into the quiet and empty locker rooms and takes a long, hot shower. He considers sleeping here overnight, and then walking home in the morning. It’s about seven miles back to the house, and he isn’t sure he can make it in his flip-flops, definitely not at night, definitely not in his bathing suit. The logistics of survival begin to overwhelm him. He dries off and looks for clothes to steal, but there aren’t any. He needs dinner. He walks back out to the food court and stares at the counter where a teenaged girl with a red and white paper hat prepares a hot dog for a customer. He wraps his towel tightly around his shoulders, and moves closer to a heat lamp, the glowing red coils humming. He can’t stop shivering.
The girl behind the counter sees him and motions him over. She has acne all over her cheeks. Without saying anything she throws him a bag of potato chips.
“I don’t have any money,” he tells her.
She smiles, put her finger to her lips, and winks. She turns to a customer, and Lenny stares at his small bag of chips, amazed by this act of kindness. Then he tears into it and tries to eat too fast, the chips cutting his mouth.
“Lenny?” his mother calls.
He turns. She carries her straw beach bag and is wearing a sweatshirt. She waves him over, and he runs to her, his flip-flops slapping the cement.
“Are you okay?” she asks, taking him into her arms.
He is so relieved that he buries his face in her sweatshirt and sobs.
Her sweatshirt is soft. Soft and warm. The contrast with the cold air, the smell of chlorine and sunscreen, the stinging salt of the potato chips on his chapped lips—all of these remain vivid in his memory, and he’s certain it’s because of the uniqueness of the experience, the distress imprinting every detail so that all he has to do is smell chlorine and remember everything.
Perhaps his father’s connection to the Navy and his obsession with weakness makes most of Lenny’s early experiences with water traumatic. Yul tries to teach Lenny to swim by throwing him off a dock and into a lake in Upstate New York. He watches Lenny thrash and panic, and Lenny yells for help, but Yul just says, “Swim.”
Lenny sinks. He stops thrashing. He looks up and sees the wavy, blurry blue sky through the water, and his father’s silhouette leaning over. He knows enough to hold his breath, but not enough to paddle. As he sinks deeper down he thinks, It’s so quiet.
Then his father jumps in and pulls him out, sighing. He lifts Lenny up onto the dock, where he curls up and shivers. He breathes deeply. He’s confused by the whole experience. Yul stares at him, puzzled, almost incredulous, as he says, “You don’t have a survival instinct.”
In his own warped way he is trying to prepare his children for the harshness of the world as he knows it, and has the drill sergeant’s mentality of instilling discipline, though it’s hard for any of his children to respect his authority since he is so obviously undisciplined himself—an alcoholic and wife-beater rarely instills much confidence.
However, after Lenny learns of his father’s military background, he understands him better. Lenny researches at the Merrick Library what Navy commandos do. He learns that they are highly trained fighters who infiltrate enemy territory and dive and plant bombs underwater. He also reads about commandos knowing close-quarters, hand-to-hand combat, and becomes convinced that his father must know martial arts.
His father has seen the kung-fu books, and he has watched Lenny train on weekends in the back yard, but he never says anything. Not too long after Lenny learns about his father’s military background, and while Lenny practices his kicks in the back yard, his father walks out and watches him. Lenny asks him if he knows tae kwon do.
His father says he doesn’t.
“Didn’t you learn it in Korea as a kid?”
He shakes his head. “Tae kwon do is Japanese k-k-karate made K-Korean. It d-didn’t happen until I was in the Navy.” His stutter is particularly bad during quieter moments like these, the hard consonants elongating and stumbling.
“What did you learn in the Navy?”
He says, “Self-defense.”
“Martial arts?”
“Judo.”
“Can you show me?”
“You want me to show you judo?”
Lenny nods his head.
His father puts down his drink and says, “I will show you one move. It’s a basic flip. Come here.”
He approaches, knowing that his father only had one or two glasses, so is okay. Yul tells his son that he will use Lenny’s own movements to help take him down. He says, “Come at me.”
“How?”
“Like you want to grab me or push me.”
Lenny steps forward. His father yanks him closer, pulling him off-balance, and then everything suddenly spins over him. Lenny lands on the grass with a thump, but his father cushions the fall with his arm. He lets Lenny go and stands over him. “You see how I use your force to flip you?”
He pulls Lenny up, and laughs when Lenny staggers back, dizzy. He then shows Lenny how to pivot his body, thrust his hip out, and pull an opponent over his hip and onto the ground. When he tells Lenny to try it on him, Lenny says, “You’re too big.”
“The bigger your opponent, the more momentum he has. Try.” His father moves toward him and grabs his shoulders, pushing. Lenny steps back, pulls his father forward, and turns. His father then lets Lenny flip him over his hip, and his father lands on the grass.
He stands up slowly, brushing off his jeans. He then pats Lenny’s head and says, “Good job.”
Lenny turns to the house, and notices his mother watching anxiously. When she sees that he’s okay she smiles and disappears into the kitchen.
His father picks up his drink and sits on the rickety patio chair, propping his feet on a picnic bench. He watches Lenny continue practicing his martial arts.
He asks, “You really want to learn tae kwon do?”
“They teach it at Korean churches. Maybe we all go tomorrow.”
Lenny asks if he would have to go to bible study.
“Yes. You have to take Korean language lessons too.”
“I don’t know any Korean.”
“That is why you take lessons.”
All that matters to Lenny is the tae kwon do, so he agrees. He hurries back to his room to study up on tae kwon do terms.
That night he listens to The Five Deadly Venoms on the small cassette tape recorder, the large white earpiece chafing his ear canal. Since he recorded the movie simply by placing the recorder next to the TV, it also picked up his sister asking him what he was doing, and his shushing her. Lenny memorized most of the dialogue and can envision the scenes as the story unfolds in his ear, the cheesy sound effects even cheesier when isolated from the screen. But he mouths the words of his favorite character, the Scorpian.
In his other ear he hears his parents fighting. Even though he doesn’t know the Korean language, he seems to be able to understand bits and pieces of the fight, especially when the occasional English word is dropped in, like “store” or “taxes.” They are arguing about the store losing money, about the robbery, and about going to church. The fight isn’t a bad one, because his mother seems to get a concession, although Lenny isn’t sure what that is. They withdraw to different parts of the house—his father in the living room, his mother in the bedroom—and the house becomes oddly quiet.
His mother reads the bible, his father plays classical records on the stereo, his sister writes her book, his brother is out with his friends, and Lenny listens to the static-filled tape of a badly dubbed kung-fu flick. It’s a normal Saturday night.