“Aga? Are you asleep?”
I faced the wall, my laptop in bed with me. Omma perched on the side of my bed. She shook my shoulder gently.
“Mmmhmm.”
“Aga.”
I flipped myself over in bed. Omma looked smaller than ever, and it seemed as if she had sprouted tens of gray hairs in the past few hours. She couldn’t look me in the eye and stared at the sheets as she spoke.
“I’m sorry to hear about the pain you carry,” Omma finally said. “It hurts to hear someone has damaged my child like this.”
Damaged? Why would you say that?
I ignored her, looking up at the yellowing magnolia paint on the ceiling. I remembered the day Omma learned the word “magnolia.” When they laid down roots in this Morden house, she began asking Baba to plant her the tree with the lotus-like pink flowers. Omma didn’t know the name of the plant in English, and Baba was stumped. So he drove her to five different Homebases and let her roam until she found the tree that reminded her of home. They brought it back and planted it outside their bedroom window. My magnolia, my magnolia she would say every morning, before WhatsApping me close-up shots of its new buds.
“But,” Omma spoke, “we all carry pain, my girl.”
“For once can we stop with the musings?” I snapped. I then noticed the melancholic look on my mum’s face. She was glazed over. “Omma?”
“Your father and I think,” she eventually spoke, “that it’s best if we don’t speak of this again.”
I waited a beat to see if there was anything further.
“That’s it?” I exploded. “You came in here to tell me you never want to hear about it again?”
“Talking won’t help you.”
“Just because you’re emotionally repressed doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do things,” I shot back.
Omma looked as though a bucket of ice-cold water had been dumped on her head. I thought she would humble me again. But her lips pressed together. She brought her hands to cover her face. They had a patina of age spots splattered over the papery skin. I heard Omma suck in air and then slowly push it out. In and out, in and out, all the while unwilling to let me see her face. In this position, I could clearly see the raised squishy skin of the scar on her forearm. It was half a foot long and jagged, with haphazard lines across it that made clear the stitches were the work of no surgeon. I used to trace it as a child and ask her how she got it. And each time she would tell fantastical, mythical stories about mermaids on Jeju Island. Her revisionist history. I never learned what caused the injury that left this brutish gash. That was Omma: always holding herself back, keeping her secrets lingering within. Never sharing her scars, even with us.
“Omma?” I gently tapped at her forearm, nudging her to stop covering her face. “Please stop. Look at me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Trust me, a widow knows another widow’s sorrow.”
“So why can’t we talk about it?” I asked. Omma said nothing and I said, “It’ll eat you up inside if you don’t speak about it.” I should know. “What is it?”
“There is no one thing.” She switched to Korean. “I know your pain because I know it is not one thing. It is layers and layers and layers. You wouldn’t leave your relationship, want to leave your job, if it was one thing. What happened to you, aga, it kills me to hear. I knew there was something wrong with you since you came here crying that night in December.” She eyeballed me with laser vision and I felt as though she opened me up completely. A wry smile spilled across her face. “But in my mind, in some ways,” she raised her shoulders and eyebrows, “it was a good thing.”
I nearly popped out of myself. How could she say it was a good thing?
“It opened your eyes,” she said, her body leaning forward, her eyes grave like an oracle. “You see now, eh? What I was telling you all these years? The world will not bend for you. When you were born, we had no one. We couldn’t speak the language here. We were turned away from job after job. No matter how desperate we got, no one helped us. And no one will help you either. We learned how to press it down”—she held her hand flat horizontally and mimed pushing down her torso—“push push push. That’s what han is.”
I finally understood. It’s not that Omma thought it was best for me to never speak of what had happened. She snuffed out her pain because she never had an alternative. She experienced tragedies in her motherland. But it was being here, in this country, that caused the death of her inner self by a thousand cuts. When we spoke in Korean, she was articulate and erudite. She had panache and wit. That part of her—her sparkling intelligence—had been hidden behind a lexicon inaccessible to her. She was rageful, but forced to be silent. And that was now her only mode of operating. Encouraging me to continue in that cycle of repression was the only advice she knew to give. It had become almost a source of pride; Omma considered herself the Knower of All Hard Things, things I could only experience diluted.
“I don’t tell you not to speak about it because I don’t want to hear it,” Omma said. “I say it because you must learn.” Her back straightened; her face hardened. “You need to learn to hold yourself back. You must control yourself.”
I felt numb. I wanted softness. I wanted tenderness from my mother. I wanted her to sit with me into the night because she knew I was scared to sleep. Scared to remember it all again in the morning. I wanted heart emojis on my phone to remind me I was loved. I wanted to be told it would all be okay, even if she didn’t know it would be. But as I looked at my mother, I realized I have always craved something from her that she was unable to give me.
I could see now. How similar we really were. How much silence had robbed the both of us.
“I’m sure you will overcome this. My brave girl.” She kissed me on the forehead. “Now rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”