Every Sunday we went to church. On the way you passed the American Roman Catholic church, the Korean Roman Catholic church, the Chinese Buddhist temple, the Pakistani mosque, and an ever-expanding assortment of Korean Presbyterian and Methodist churches. (The Korean Protestants, unlike their Catholic counterparts, seemed to multiply like Jesus’s five loaves and two fishes.) Service was held in one half of a two-family house. After Pastor Bae gave the sermon, the mothers prepared bibimbap in the kitchen for the entire congregation.
Every Sunday, for as long as I can remember, Eunice Oh and I would find each other after the service. She’d always been the same Coke-bottle-glassed girl since childhood. In truth she and I were bound together less by common interests than by our differences from them, the more popular kids in our year: Jessica Bae—Pastor Bae’s daughter, who just graduated from Columbia. James Kim, who went to Wharton and was about to start at Lehman—his parents owned a deli downtown. John Hong, who was at Sophie Davis—his father’s herbal-medicine practice was down the block from Food. Jenny Lee, who went to Parsons and now did graphic design for CosmoGirl! magazine—her mother owned a nail salon on the Upper East Side, but her father graduated from Seoul National and, according to my Aunt Hannah, “was too proud to get a menial job.”
But this was our last Sunday together. Eunice was leaving again, this time for good. First it had been for MIT, where she’d majored in something called “Course VI.” Now for San Francisco, where she’d gotten an offer from Google. Eunice had had her pick of offers—including one from Yahoo!—but she went with Google. Why she would take a job with a dot-com immediately after the dot-com crash, no one could understand, but I suspected it had to do with her American boyfriend, a guy called Threepio. He’d also accepted a job in Silicon Valley. They were heading out the next day.
“The job search, how goest?” Eunice asked, pushing up the nosepiece of her thick glasses with a chubby finger.
“It goest—” I started, then stopped. You never knew what you were going to get with Eunice. One day she spoke like an Orc, the next like Shakespeare. Sometimes I found myself imitating her without even realizing I was. “It’s going. Actually, it’s not. There’s nothing on the market.”
She waved one hand in the air and rummaged through her bag with the other. The other girls from church carried purses, but Eunice had had the same Manhattan Portage messenger bag since the seventh grade, which I knew was filled with its usual jumble of stubby mass-market paperbacks, a well-thumbed C++ pocket guide with some chipmunk drawing on the cover, magazines ranging from Scientific American to the 501st Daily, assorted highlighters, and German mechanical pencils (.5-mm thickness) and their lead refills. Eunice Oh could not wait for the day when paper went digital.
She pulled out a copy of the Village Voice; its circulation in our part of Queens was nonexistent. The page was opened to the classifieds, her finger pointing to one of the listings.
I peered down. An ad for a fertility clinic. “You want me to sell my eggs?”
“No. This one.” She jabbed again. And there, wedged between the clinic’s posting and one from an escort service offering “discreet and seXXXy services” was the following:
BROOKLYN FAMILY DESIRING AU PAIR
We wish to invite into our family an au pair (i.e., a live-in “baby-sitter,” although n.b., we take issue with such infantilizing labels; seeing as the term has yet to be eradicated from the vernacular, we have opted—albeit reluctantly—to use it in this text for the sole purpose of engaging in the lingua franca) who will foster a nurturing, intellectually stimulating, culturally sensitive, and ultimately “loving” (we will indulge the most essentialist, platonic construct of the term) environment for our bright (one might even say precocious) nine-year-old daughter, adopted from the Liaoning province of China. In these postmodern, postracial times, we desire said au pair to challenge the existing hegemonic . . .
The ad cut out, exceeding its allotted space.
Eunice knew I was supposed to be looking for a job in finance, not a nanny gig. It was insulting that she thought so little of me. I might not have gone to a name-brand college like MIT or Columbia (even though everyone at church thought that Columbia was one of the easiest Ivies to get into), but I’d still gotten an offer from Lowood. I wanted out of Flushing, but not so badly that I’d be willing to change diapers or the equivalent in order to do it. I had spent enough of my lifetime watching my cousins Mary and George walk all over me because they knew I had absolutely no power over them. I had a plan. Baby-sitting was not part of that plan.
“Don’t you want to get out?” Eunice asked, looking at me. “A very sheltered existence you lead.”
She was one to talk. “So you’re telling me to go live with a bunch of total strangers. Who can’t even write normal English.”
“What do you expect? They’re probably academics.”
“They live in Brooklyn.” The whole point was not to trade one outer borough for the other but to upgrade to the city. We had spent countless rides on the 7 train, watching as the Manhattan skyline bloomed into view. As kids we used to imagine living in deluxe condos that overlooked Central Park.
I sighed. “A bunch of places have my résumé on file. If something comes up in the next year—”
“Much can happen in a year,” she interrupted. “Just apply. Worst-case scenario, you hate them, they hate you, you part ways. But I have a good feeling about this. Their daughter’s Asian, you’re also Asian”—she glanced up at my face, revised—“ish. And you can play up your whole epic sob story: uncle, grocery store, orphan. Everyone loves a good orphan story.” (Technically I was only half an orphan.) “Jane. Your ticket out, this could be.”
Eunice extended the paper anew. Reluctantly I took it from her.
We made our way to the line for food. Eunice’s father was standing in front of us. I bowed; Dr. Oh and I were nearly the same height. “Eunice-ah,” he said, after I greeted him. “Make sure you mail letter to Jane after you leave home.” Dr. Oh spoke a fluid, gentle English, a far cry from the choppy waters of Sang’s speech.
“Abba: letter writing is obsolete.”
“Yes, well . . .” He fumbled for words; finding none, he patted a warm hand on his daughter’s back. But instead of leaning into her father’s embrace, she pointed ahead. “Abba, the line. It’s moving.” Eunice Oh had no nunchi whatsoever.
The mothers heaped rice onto our Styrofoam plates, and we loaded up on bean sprouts with red-pepper flakes, spinach and carrots drizzled in sesame-seed oil, ground beef marinated in a sweet soy sauce, brown squiggles of some namul root whose name I didn’t know in English, fried eggs with still-runny yolks, shredded red-leaf lettuce, a spoonful of red-pepper paste, and of course squares of cabbage kimchi.
We headed to the kids’ table. Jessica Bae dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and said, “So, Eunice, you’re, like, leaving us. That’s so sad!”
“Yo, Eunice, isn’t that, like, mad stupid? Working for a dot-com right now?” James Kim said.
“A good company it is. A greater company it will be.” When she spoke, she looked at no one in particular, which gave the impression that she was talking to herself. Sometimes I wondered how Eunice Oh had ever managed to get a boyfriend.
Jenny Lee tittered into her napkin. Jessica Bae turned to me. “So . . . Jane!” she said brightly. “That, like, totally sucks about Lowood. How’s the job hunt going?”
“. . .” I hated when it was my turn.
“My mom said she saw you at your uncle’s store yesterday.” Jessica paused. “It must be really tough to get a job when, like, you know . . .”
“You know” meant “You only graduated from CUNY Baruch.”
I could feel Eunice studying my face. “Jane has a job she’s considering. An au pair job.”
I shot her a look of nunchi, but Eunice pretended not to see me.
“A what pair?” said John Hong.
“Isn’t that, like, a housemaid?” said Jenny Lee.
“That doesn’t look good at all,” Jessica Bae continued. “Do you know about our rotational internship? At Bear Stearns?” She repeated the name of her firm, as if I could forget. “You should apply? It’s, like, for college seniors, but I can totally put in a good word for you?”
Did I mention Jessica Bae only got into Columbia off the wait list?
Then my cousin Mary came to our table with a plate full of just vegetables (in public she was perpetually on a diet) and took the seat next to John Hong. She smiled brightly at him. She smiled brightly at everyone, except Eunice, at whom she curled her lip and said, “Eunice.” When her eyes fell on me, they grew round. “Omigod, Jane,” she said, pointing at my face.
Everyone’s eyes followed the direction of her pointing.
“You’ve got . . . on your forehead . . .”
I swiped at my face, thinking red-pepper paste had splashed me. My fingers fell on a tiny bump. I saw James Kim feeling his own face for pimples. He’d had horrible acne since the eighth grade. When I looked at Eunice for confirmation, she just shrugged. “Darker matters have come to pass,” she said.
Jessica Bae began rooting through her tiny purse. She pushed a travel-size bottle of astringent and a Baggie of cotton pads into my hand. “Here. Go to the bathroom.”
Since everyone expected me to drown my pimple in purple-tinted salycylic acid, I got up, dreading how their eyes would once again latch onto my face when I returned. On the short walk to the bathroom, I ran into Pastor Bae and his wife, Jenny Lee’s parents, James Kim’s, John Hong’s, Eunice’s, and of course Sang and Hannah. I forced myself to go bow, bow, bow to each and every adult I met.
I finally reached the bathroom, and leaned all my weight against the locked door. My neck was sore from the rapid succession of bowing. My cheeks hurt from all the strained smiling. I lifted my eyes to the mirror. What I saw was limp black hair. Baggy brown eyes. Sharp and angry cheekbones, pasty skin, pointy chin, and—like a maraschino cherry on top of the whole mess—a furious red pimple smack-dab at the center of my forehead, the same spot where Hannah’s finger had jabbed me the day before. At first glance I looked Korean enough, but after a more probing exploration across my facial terrain, a dip down into the craters under my eyebrows, or up and over the hint of my nose bridge, you sensed that something was a little off. You realized that the face you were staring into was not Korean at all but Korean-ish. A face different from every single other face in that church basement.
* * *
After lunch Eunice offered to give me a ride home. Staring down the expanse of Northern Boulevard through the windshield, she let out a long, low sigh. But soon she would leave Flushing and slip back into her world, the one where each ping she volleyed forth would be met with its appropriate pong. I was glad for her. Sad for me, but glad for her.
She gripped the steering wheel and drove off.
When we pulled up to 718 Gates, I said, “I guess this is it.”
Eunice’s eyes were still fixed on the road ahead. “That’s right.”
I reached for the door handle, paused, and blurted, “I’ll miss you.”
“I know.” Her words sounded canned.
I jerked open the handle. “Well, don’t get all mushy on me.” One foot was already out the door. “See you, Eunice.”
“It’s ‘So long, Princess . . .’” Eunice’s tone changed to the one she used when enlightening the unenlightened, but there was a hitch in her throat. She stopped, started again. “Good-bye, Jane Re. I wish you well. May the Force be with you.”
“And also with you,” I found myself saying.
We shook hands.
“Lose the nunchi, Jane,” Eunice said. With these words she drove off and we each went our separate way.