In another life, my parents would have been nomads. This year was their twenty-sixth in the UK, and yet their two-bed-terraced in Morden felt temporary. They had an agility in life, nimbly moving from place to place, business venture to business venture, with an entrepreneurship that seemed to naturally grace immigrants. Necessity is the mother of invention.
My father is an Anatolian who came to London in July 1992 from his family’s hazelnut farm on the Black Sea coast. A family friend got him a job in a hand car wash in Mitcham. The first month was lonely. With little money, Baba used the network of red buses to learn London. A fluttery skip from the 118 onto the 159 onto the 390. A chain linking him to Brixton to Lambeth North, then Westminster, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly. What a way to see the city for a pound fifty. Baba climbed on the 390 to see the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. And on that August day, it was all over.
The only spare seat was next to Omma. She was dressed in a rust-orange linen shirt, denim shorts, and white tennis socks. Her perfect teeth in a smile, marveling at Marble Arch. Their romance sounded like it belonged on the grainy reel of a film camera. The Polaroids have that soft-focus light, like a layer of gossamer covered them. She was on a three-month trip to Europe before starting a prestigious clerkship at a bank in Seoul. She was supposed to join her friends in Antwerp the following week but never made it, gallivanting across London with my dad instead. Neither spoke much English. When the lack of common language baffled me, to my utmost horror, Baba said with a wink that they both spoke the international language of love. The whirlwind halted six weeks later when Omma first made out those two pink lines. The world’s a different place now, she’d said, but back then, there was incommunicable shame in returning to Seoul, unmarried and pregnant with a foreigner’s baby. There was a Korean word for that baby: 혼혈, mixed blood. Baba’s family also wanted nothing to do with this loose woman who’d led him astray. And someone out of his faith, too, no wonder. It had to be London, aga.
Omma and Baba married on New Year’s Eve when she was three months pregnant. They celebrated their fledgling family as 1993 was called in, and they were promptly excommunicated from their families. They got to work immediately on their nascent business: brokering the lowest insurance premiums for small local businesses. Omma worked the books, her brain whirring with calculations, her stomach blooming by the day. At four foot nine inches, her compactness conveyed a sense of intimidating efficiency. Late at night, she would flick the switch on her small desk lamp and painstakingly pencil the day’s numbers into an old-school exercise book repurposed into a ledger.
Meanwhile, Baba was at the coalface. Fifteen-hour days, hundred-hour weeks. Every morning he would open his battered London Underground map that was falling apart at the folds and inspect it. I still don’t understand why he didn’t periodically replace it—they were free in any station. There was an oblique pride in its struggle to keep together at the seams, as if it mapped his struggle to plant roots in this city. He would pick a line and ride it end to end. From Edgware to Morden, Wimbledon to Upminster, West Ruislip to Epping. Some days he wouldn’t be able to complete the whole line, alighting so often in Zones 2 to 9. Zone 1 was futile: no florist in Covent Garden or coffee shop in Regent’s Park would give their business to the young man with broken English. He wouldn’t waste precious time on his Travelcard there. He stuck to areas that had dense immigrant populations and combed their high streets. Walking into every kebab shop, dry cleaner, money-transfer hole in the wall, chippy, Brazilian hairdresser, Nigerian fabric house, and Vietnamese pho shop, he offered their services.
It helped that we didn’t comfortably slot into London’s patchwork. The Turkish pockets north of the river made Omma’s loneliness shine bright like a beacon. The suburbia of Koreatown made Baba itchy with boredom. We moved nearly every year, looking for more fertile pastures for the business. School friends were temporary. Some flats were better, but sometimes Omma and I shared a bed, with Baba on a mattress on the floor. Perhaps that’s why they never had more children. It was the three of us knitted together.
Slowly, through word of mouth, their business grew. In 2000, after a particularly good period, Baba took me out and we picked a denim pencil case with a pink sequined heart embroidered on the front, a purple bendy ruler, and a set of gel pens. The same day, Omma splurged on a full-price dress from Monsoon and delightedly twirled for us in it. There are few memories that hold such a nostalgic pull over me as that day.
Everything changed on September 11, 2001. Insurance premiums skyrocketed globally and work dried up. Baba slunk back to the Mitcham car wash after an annus horribilis of business drought. In 2008, six years of loyal service and quiet savings later, Omma and Baba wanted something of their own. They committed to that two-bed-terraced in Morden and bought their own car wash business on the A24 flyover. Three months later, the markets crashed.
I stepped through the front door to see Omma blowing on a spoon of steaming kimchi-chigae.
“Aga,” Omma beckoned. My mother still called me baby.
“Hey Omma,” I said, kissing her on the cheek. She looked smaller every time I came home, her skin more translucent. She wore her uniform of black jersey trousers and a loose linen shirt that was so long it looked like a kaftan. She had an elegant figure. A lifetime of Korean cooking, healthy and high in vital nutrients, made my mother svelte in a relaxed way. No harsh contours, but gentle lines. A man, who we later learned was world-renowned plastic surgeon Terry Shafiq, once stopped Omma in Victoria coach station and informed her that she had a “million-dollar forehead.” Since then, I have admired the natural tautness of her brow.
“Eat! Eat!” she exclaimed. My mother’s sole mission in life was to feed me until I was bursting, and then send me home laden with Tupperware full of homemade cooking. “How is it?”
“Mmm, tasty.” The sour tang of the kimchi soup—the older the kimchi used the better—was refreshing. The traditional pork belly used in the soup was swapped for beef for Baba, such was the fused cuisine in this household.
“Of course it’s tasty, I know how you like it.” Omma pinched my cheek.
“Babam, come hug your father,” my dad said, coming into the kitchen. “Ayy, have you lost weight? Vallahi, you’re skin and bones. A fish needs flesh!”
“Possibly,” I said, as he pulled me in. I smarted as Baba accidentally prodded my bruises. I’d briefly forgotten about them, but the Turkish were robust huggers. As always, he smelled like the astringent lemon cologne he slapped his face with daily.
“Naber?” I asked. What’s new?
“You know what they say: the red rose”—Baba gazed out the window to conjure the appropriate sage-like contemplation—“will always be red.”
“No one says that, Baba.” Do all brown fathers make up expressions?
“Here.” He thrust a plate of sliced melon in my face, ignoring me. The fruit said, more than words ever could, I love you, my child. He looked surprised as I shook my head and pushed the plate away.
“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” I said.
“Aygo, I told you,” my mother interjected. “The microwaves from your phone are frying your brain. Tak tak tak tak”—Omma did a schtick of me messaging on my phone—“all day long, tak tak tak on the face book and instant gam. That’s why you always have headaches.”
“No, Omma,” I sighed. “I had too much to drink last night.”
“Child! You come to your parents’ house drunk?!”
“I’m not drunk, I just have a hangover.”
“Children these days,” my father tsked, waving his hand toward me, “no respect.”
Omma and Baba nodded at each other in agreement. I clocked the number of times they referred to me as a child.
“Sorry.” I pouted. “I had a work event.”
“Tell me, tell me, how did it go?” my mother said as she set down the ttukbaegi—a clay bowl that went straight from stove to table, soup bubbling within—and clicked her tongue to indicate to my dad that lunch was ready. “My brilliant lawyer,” she clucked, holding my face.
“Mashallah!”
I would be lying if I said I’ve never harbored any resentment toward my parents. In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and Yumi and Yusuf hoping for a lawyer of a child. An immigrant stereotype that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. A bookworm my whole life, at seventeen I announced to them that I wanted to read English literature at university. It remains the funniest joke they’ve ever heard.
If I were to dissect this ugly bud of quiet resentment, I’d have to admit that it was rooted in how grossly underprepared I felt arriving at university for the nuances of polite society. I went in trying to summon the chutzpah of my parents. But restraint was a cornerstone of the upper class. Being scrappy was distasteful. Even the concept, the very point, of education in the UK was alien to us. To Omma and Baba, education existed solely to equip someone for a vocation. There was too little time, too much competition, to do anything else. By contrast, at university, it was all about critical thought. Massaging controversial topics for the sake of growth.
Of course, almost everyone liked to think of themselves as ideologically liberal, but their conservative leanings were thinly veiled. Discussions about the welfare state, or the legacy of empire, or equality of opportunity were intellectual Play-Doh, to knead and mold to develop nothing more than one’s debating skills. Privilege comes in many forms: having no emotional investment in the political topics you debate is one of them. Peers tussled over the role of devil’s advocate because championing for closing borders to refugees can be a gleeful mental exercise when your family have never fled war. There was a flair with which faux liberals discussed politics, as if they were gladiators in the Roman amphitheater. In reality, it looked a lot more like they were standing in a ten-person circle jerk of self-gratification.
Some years later, iterations of these same people suggested at dinner parties that I was a sellout for joining Reuben. They spoke with ennui of needing a job to pay the bills. In their work as a Chelsea gallery curator, money wasn’t important. Coincidentally, the only people who think money doesn’t matter are those who have always had it.
By the time I went home for Christmas after the first term, I was unable to contain my relief to be with my parents again. By that point, I’d fallen hopelessly for Kit. New to love, I was basking in all its splendor. But also innately understanding that part of loving meant being someone who could be loved in return. Kit unlocked an alternate universe of boat races, lawn croquet, and cream sweaters slung over shoulders. And I played Twister with my personality to see what fit best. It felt like I’d leapt across a crater to come back home to Omma and Baba, to my safe space. Be the three of us again.
The problem, I realized only later, was that I resented needing a safe space.
“I’m not sure, I was sat next to the Founding Partner,” I said, tired with my parents’ inquisition into last night’s blur.
“The Founding Partner?” Omma slapped my dad’s arm. “I told you, Yusuf! A dragon rises from the stream! Did you make a good impression?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure.” I struggled to articulate, or remember, last night. I checked my work phone, out of habit.
“Did you speak to him much? Did he like you? What did you talk about? Were you polite?”
“Can we not with all the questions? I feel quite anxious about it, actually.”
“It’s because you’re not eating properly, aga.” My mum sprang into action, spooning a portion enough for two grown men onto my plate. Surrounding the soup were dishes of banchan—sides that complemented every meal. Korean food had broken into the mainstream recently. Tiny glass jars of “Kim Kong Kimchi” sold at farmers’ markets for extortionate prices. In reality, kimchi was the umbrella term for the hundreds of varieties of salted fermented vegetables. Cabbages, cucumbers, perilla leaves, radishes, turnips, you name it, it was kimchied in our house. Every omma had her own recipe that formed the bedrock of her daily cooking, and her children would spend their lifetimes trying to emulate it.
On his first visit, a year after we met, Kit had relished the onslaught of flavors that adorned my parents’ place. I was a ball of nerves when I answered the door to him. Meshing my Ralph Lauren–shirted boyfriend with my no-frills-attached parents felt as unnatural to me as sprinkling chocolate chips over a pizza. Despite not taking his shoes off as he tracked into our living room—which was definitely registered by Omma—he was the picture of charm.
“Yumi, pleasure to meet you.” Kit had to nearly bend in half to give Omma a hug. “A little bird told me that peonies are your favorite—these are for you.”
“Aygo, aygo.” My mother giggled, accepting the bouquet. Kit looked at me mystified, and I whispered a translation: oh my, oh my. “But they’re not in season?”
“Ahhh.” Kit tapped the end of his nose. “I have my sources!”
Baba was in the hallway, approaching Kit with caution.
“Yusuf!” Kit, overconfident, heartily shook Baba’s hand. “How are you, mate?”
“Yani, this morning another man brought my wife her favorite flowers,” Baba quipped.
“Well, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you.” Kit pulled a plastic box from his backpack. “I know you have a sweet tooth, so I brought you some baklava.”
“Nice doing business with you!” Baba chuckled, already opening the box of syrupy goodies. Warmth glowed in my chest as I watched Omma bustling in the kitchen, trimming her peonies, and Baba’s satisfied face as he enjoyed his childhood favorite treat.
“Thank you.” I lifted my face toward Kit’s like a sunflower searching for the sun.
“The least I could do.” He kissed my temple, which I allowed because my parents were preoccupied elsewhere.
For the rest of the afternoon, a shy rapport blossomed between my three loves, and I felt idiotic for ever worrying. Kit was flawlessly polite, inquiring about my mother’s traditional cooking methods, asking questions about what was in each jar. She practically expired when he said no wonder Jade is both smart and a great cook—look at her mother. When we sat for lunch, Omma, without warning, plopped a pickled garlic clove in Kit’s mouth while he was yawning and then nodded enthusiastically as he chewed. He laugh-coughed and his eyes watered. Too much, I worried. We’re too much.
“So, Yumi”—Kit leaned across the table—“what are your thoughts on Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear program? Do you think reunification will ever be on the table, or has too much damage been done?” He was oblivious to Omma’s startled expression, and carried on. “The New York Times did an interesting piece on how the two Koreas are currently the world’s most perplexing political problem—have you had a chance to read it?”
Oh dear.
I kicked him under the table. Kit turned to me, genuinely baffled.
“Kit.” Baba coughed. Omma stared into her bowl. “What football team do you go for?”
Kit’s eyes darted between the three of us, thrown by the sudden stonewalling.
“Erm, I’m more a rugby man myself, to be honest.”
“Right.”
Thirty gelatinous seconds stretched by, no one knowing what to say.
“Excuse me.” Kit got up. “Just going to the loo.”
I reached out and grasped Omma’s hand.
“What kind of questions were they?” Omma spoke in Korean. Baba’s rudimentary grasp couldn’t follow us, but he knew what she was saying.
“Kit is trying to find common ground with you. He’s trying,” I said weakly.
“Common ground?” Omma snapped. “It was a civil war. Remember that.” She never could bear to speak about her country halved. Shortly before it was a cacophonous, skyscrapered country bursting with technology and pop culture, Korea was a decimated place. My grandfather was a rice farmer. During the Korean War, his field hands were all conscripted to fight and he had no choice but to employ temporary workers. They were travelers—refugees—fleeing from the North where their homes had been burnt to cinders. After harvest was over, he gave them each a small parcel of rice to aid them on their onward journey. Those grains left a proverbial breadcrumb trail. The next day American soldiers came. Communist sympathizer, they said. Collaborating with the enemy and harboring fugitives. Omma’s appa was never seen again.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as Kit returned to the table. “I’m sorry.”
We spoke about it that evening. He asked why Omma had clammed up. I felt an unfamiliar flash of annoyance toward her. For making the first meeting—one that I had built up so much in my head—awkward and uncomfortable when Kit didn’t mean anything malicious by his questions. I explained why it was traumatic for her, she finds it hard to talk about. He apologized, said God, how could I have been so ignorant. I soothed him, kissed him, and said please don’t worry about it, you weren’t to know. The following weekend, he took Omma to Columbia Road Flower Market and carried home armfuls of peonies. And for that Christmas, Kit came bearing a bottle of Jo Malone’s Peony & Blush Suede.
I spent the afternoon with a hot water bottle tucked into my jeans for my period cramps. I helped my parents with the list of IT tasks they had set out for me. Despite their business acumen, anything remotely technological was a frazzled, flustered affair. Omma swore black and blue that she didn’t have a password for her email account. I took a punt on “Jade93” and got in. Meanwhile, Baba was conscientiously objecting to online banking, convinced that the entire concept was a large-scale embezzlement scheme. By the time it was dark out, my hangover had gone from pulsating headaches to intense fatigue. My pores clogged with damp, boozy sweat. I needed to curl up in bed and reassess my life choices.
“Your father will drive you home,” Omma said as I pulled on my coat and hugged her goodbye.
“Will I?” my dad piped up. “Stay! There’s this new crime show on Netflix. Looks gory!”
We always watched murder documentaries together, but today I couldn’t imagine anything worse for my hangxiety.
“No, it’s fine, Baba.”
“Drive your daughter home, Yusuf,” my mother ordered. Baba grumbled as he faffed around, muttering about how there was no rest for the “wicket.”
“Haydi, haydi,” Baba huffed, “let’s go.”
Baba carried two tote bags of Tupperware meals up to my flat and packed them away in the freezer. Then he kissed me on the forehead.
“I’d better get home, babam, it’s getting late.”
My dad zipped closed his gray-blue fleece, one that he would wear daily from September to March. The buzz of the zipper woke a formless, sinewy vision. Material chafing against itself as a tie was pulled off a collar. Green silk glistening in the dim light, almost like a snake coiled around a neck.
“Okay, hayatim.” Baba’s voice pierced my thoughts and the image of the snake slithered away, deeper into my memory. The –m suffix in Turkish—hayatim, kizim, yavrum—indicated a possessive: my life, my daughter, my child. “Rest tonight. And eat more, please.”
“Goodnight, Baba,” I mustered, still thinking of that shimmery green.
Baba turned on his heel to walk out of my flat. As his back retreated down the narrow staircase, all four walls around me seemed airless. I felt like a claustrophobe in a lift, watching the doors close. Boxed in, suffocated. His black head of hair was soon out of sight, and a tiny voice inside me felt like gasping Baba, please don’t go.