—————————— I SPOTTED MOM WHITE-KNUCKLING the wheel of her Toyota Prius toward the curb. The car was new: Mom had finally broken her lifelong boycott against the Japanese colonizers because, she explained, the mileage was unbeatable, and anyway, we had to let go of that ancestral shit sooner or later.
A massive concrete belt shaded the arrivals area at LAX. The air was hot and tasted like dust and metal. A sea of black rideshares honked and jockeyed for space while the passengers around me squinted at their phones trying to match the cars to dots on their screens in the neoliberal perversion of hailing a cab.
Mom leaned out of her window, grinning and flailing an arm. Her car drifted forward and a rideshare driver let loose his horn. He turned around and thrust his hand up rudely.
A cold dread rose up in me. I knew what was coming.
“Hey, motherfucker!” Mom’s scream was like a gunshot and her smile disappeared into a grimace.
The man stared, frozen in an awkward pivot out his window.
“Don’t honk at me!” she yelled. “Watch where you’re going.”
The man shook his head, almost somberly, and sped away. A few others turned to stare, Mom’s voice having risen above the commotion and roar of engines, and kept staring as they realized it had come from a round-faced, middle-aged Asian woman with a sensible bob.
Mom double-parked, and by the time she got out she was wearing a big, childlike grin again.
“My son!” she exclaimed, wrapping me in a hug. “What,” she stepped back and looked at me, “you’re embarrassed by your mother? Please. English is my second fucking language.”
“I mean,” I muttered, “your car was rolling forward.”
“I must’ve been distracted by my handsome son.” Mom reached out to smack my cheek with the butt of her palm, that babying gesture I knew from childhood.
I rolled my eyes and stepped back so that her fingers grazed my face. I slid my carry-on into the trunk and, before the traffic cop could scold us, climbed in and shut the door with a thump. The din of the arrivals area evaporated, replaced by the soft whisper of air conditioning.
“How is Halmoni?” I asked.
Mom was silent.
“I could’ve come back sooner.”
“I told you about the surgery,” Mom countered. “You said you were busy with all the organizing.”
I didn’t remember that, but she was probably telling the truth. I usually scrolled through Twitter during our phone check-ins as Mom ran through her list of updates and Dad interjected with the occasional joke.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “It’s a critical time—I might miss the sentencing.”
“Wah, a serious activist!”
Mom and Dad talked about my activism with the same condescension other parents talked about their kids’ singer-songwriter careers. “Pickets in Brooklyn are no joke,” I countered. “We have to stomp so our toes don’t go numb. It’s not like protests here, where people wear shorts.”
“You’re gonna freeze your skinny butt off,” she chuckled. “I think about you whenever it’s in the paper, that Chinese cop. You can tell from his face that boy’s a little lost.”
“Yeah, he was probably ‘lost’ in that public housing stairwell; ‘lost’ those twelve minutes he waited to phone dispatch, while Akai Gurley lay bleeding from the bullet he fired.”
“Reed,” Mom’s voice dropped. “All that activism is making you harsh.”
I thought back to when I’d first seen Peter Liang in the courtroom. We all wore head-to-toe black in solidarity with Akai Gurley’s family, his partner and daughter and aunt sitting silent and upright a couple rows in front of us. The bailiff brought in Liang and I leaned over, wanting to look the killer cop in the face. But Liang’s baby cheeks and dumbfounded expression, his somber navy suit and basic East Asian haircut, only reminded me of the kids I knew in high school: B- Asians who always lagged a beat behind, sold weed, and asked to copy my calculus homework. I felt, of all things, let down.
Mom’s car passed through the Inglewood oil fields, a wasteland of scrubby bushes dominated by a silent army of pumpjacks churning up the earth. They dipped their insect heads until counterweights swung them back up.
“They’re going like we don’t have a hole the size of Antarctica in the ozone.”
“That’s why I got this Prius,” Mom said with pride. “You know it gets fifty miles a gallon?”
“I guess that’s a Band-Aid solution.”
We idled at a red light and Mom punched a button on her armrest. The locks clicked open. “You could always walk home.”
I turned my head and caught a flicker in Mom’s eyes. She let loose her big, guttural laugh that finished with a little cough-wheeze.
“Okay, you got me,” I said.
“Ai, so serious,” said Mom. “You’re reminding me too much of myself back in the day.”
* * *
Halmoni lay on a hospital bed staring at me as if I were a stranger. I almost didn’t recognize her, either: The hair she’d permed and dyed black all my life now grew in a gray shock. Her face was puffy and the mischievous glimmer in her eyes was gone. I’d never seen anyone look so helpless.
Mom and I sat next to each other in plastic chairs. “Maybe it would’ve been better if she’d never come to this racist country,” I said.
Mom turned to me and arched her eyebrows. “Her husband was a dog and her life in Korea was shit.” She shrugged. “It’s not like she had much choice.”
“You mean your father. Was a dog.”
“He wasn’t a father to me.” Mom clicked her tongue. “Halmoni, for that matter, wasn’t much of a mother.”
She leaned an elbow on the back of her chair, where her big, red “Goyard” purse hung. It was a top-rate Korean knockoff and she’d challenge anyone to tell the difference. She’d worn her nice leather jacket, too, as if to say this Koreatown care facility—the buzz of television from the next room, the thick bodily smells, the metal blinds—couldn’t touch her.
“That’s a little harsh, considering,” I said.
“What, I’m supposed to be nice because she had a stroke?”
“Traditionally, yeah,” I said. “This is a time of reconciliation?”
“I got her a nice bed, close to the window, and I brought flowers.” She pointed at a lavish purple orchid sitting on the nightstand.
Halmoni gummed her lips as if to protest but only managed to show us a handful of bottom teeth. I tried seeing the room as Mom did but couldn’t get past the tubes dangling from under Halmoni’s hospital blanket, one of which hooked into a feed bag that whirred and slid an inch of goop into her. “Nice,” I lied. “But does it count if you do it so grudgingly?”
“Ai, my smartass son,” she said. “You don’t know the shit I put up with from her.”
“No, I don’t. You’ve never told me.” I had some very basic questions about this frail woman lying in front of me that I’d always meant to ask in the future, when my Korean was better. That future was gone now. My Korean was still crap.
Mom flopped her hand in a lazy circle, dismissing my challenge.
A man knocked and strode—a little too familiarly—into Halmoni’s room. He wore a black smock with short sleeves and beamed. I thought of the Korean Christians in high school who walked with me to the bus stop, invited me to their Sunday morning “concerts,” and expressed sincere concern for my eternal soul when I declined. The man spoke to Mom in Korean, something about Her son? So handsome, and mentioned Chee-chush, the savior. I smiled, tight-lipped.
He took a small black jar out of his bag, screwed the top off, and dipped a finger inside. He rubbed the pearly lotion into Halmoni’s cheeks as her eyes swung around the room. I stared at this man touching my grandmother’s face—something I hadn’t done since I was a baby.
“He comes every week to do this for the patients,” said Mom. “Nice, huh?”
“Mom. This is obviously a last-minute attempt at conversion.”
Mom relaxed another inch into her chair. “Look. She loves it. She would’ve accepted a facial from a Buddhist monk, too.”
“Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
“Then Halmoni would’ve smoked it,” Mom sighed. “It’s ironic: In a way, this is what she wanted. To lie around all day being taken care of.”
The pastor screwed the lid back on his jar. Halmoni shone like a waxed apple. He stood up and handed us each a pamphlet. Mom took hers and pretended to study it.
“Ah, no,” I said, waving him away.
Mom jabbed me in the ribs. “Are you gonna give Halmoni her facials?”
I took the pamphlet and mimed interest in the haloed dove soaring across the cover. The pastor beamed at me. I watched him leave, then crumpled the paper and chucked it into the hamper full of used wipes and latex gloves.
The air in the room felt thinner, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I was five and watching Mom hold our old landline in the hallway, back when phones were plugged into walls. She yelled in Korean, her eyes drawn wide until she slammed the receiver down with a harsh clack of plastic on plastic.
“Remember,” I said, “when I was a kid, any time you were on the phone with Halmoni, I’d yell, ‘Talk nice, mommy! Why can’t you talk nice?’”
I opened my eyes. Mom’s jaw was limp as if she’d been caught in some guilty act. It was a rare moment that showed me how, the rest of the time, she weighed each emotion inside before letting it surface. This face was innocent, unguarded, and I knew she hated anyone seeing it.
She forced a cough. “I was probably telling her not to spend her money—my money, that I sent to her—on those goddamn stocks her fortune-teller told her to buy.” She pursed her lips, inviting me to counter.
I looked instead at Halmoni, who’d been following our conversation, her head rolling back and forth on her pillow. Halmoni and I had shared no plates of cookies or heart-to-hearts at the kitchen table. Her main shows of affection were inappropriate birthday gifts, like the stack of scratch-to-win tickets she handed me when I turned six. I dug up the shiny squares with a penny and jumped with excitement when I won five bucks. I begged my parents to let me redeem it while Halmoni grinned and Mom clucked with irritation.
“Obviously I don’t agree with her materialism,” I said. “But clearly Halmoni was deprived of something, and expected to get it back through this American fantasy of hitting the jackpot.”
“Excellent analysis, my son,” said Mom. “Materialism—that reminds me.” Mom reached into her Goyard bag and pulled out a box. “Halmoni doesn’t have a will or anything, and there’s nothing to give you. But you could take this.”
I opened the box. A small teapot and four cups shimmered in the dim light, white porcelain glazed in a lush blue. A golden chrysanthemum bloomed on the teapot, its petals outlined in fine metallic thread.
“Halmoni would buy all these beautiful things,” said Mom, “and when I asked her why she never used them, she’d say she was waiting to move into a big house—hint, hint—where she’d have a china cabinet to keep them all. So they’ve never been used—how silly is that?”
I felt a little flurry of greed at the luxurious set, as if it whispered that a cleaner, more beautiful life was possible. I shut the lid and handed the box back to Mom. “What,” I sneered, “I’m going to serve fine jasmine tea to my activist friends, to go with our cheese popcorn?”
Mom groaned. “My mother wouldn’t use them until she had a mansion and my son won’t because he’s waiting for the revolution.”
“I can’t believe you’re comparing Halmoni’s class aspirations to my activism.”
She shrugged. “They’re both fantasies.”
“You know,” I said, “other Asian American organizers are always amazed that my parents are political.” I pictured the way my friends’ eyes lit up, then went gloomy as they talked about the cold standoffs they had with their own parents, who threatened to stop supporting them unless they went back to premed. “Then they ask me these questions that I can’t answer because you and Dad never talk about your pasts. It’s like—you won’t pass down what you learned, and yet you think our analysis is naive. So maybe,” I calmed my voice, “you could actually tell me? Help us build cross-generational activism so we’re not starting from scratch?”
“Oh, all that ancient stuff,” Mom murmured, like I was being tedious.
Her phone dinged. She slid it out of her jacket and punched the screen with her index finger in that awkward way boomers did. “Looks like Dad can meet us for dinner. I bet you miss Korean food.”
I was thrown by the quick shift.
“Good,” she said. “There’s this new barbecue place on Vermont. All my K-Town friends say it’s the best.”
“You’re just going to dodge my questions?”
“Who can talk about these things on an empty stomach?” She stood and shrugged on her big purse. “Say goodbye to your halmoni.”
The sky was darkening outside. The fluorescent boxes set into the drop ceiling buzzed on, searing everything in a blank, shadowless light. Halmoni stared at me with watery eyes as if, though she hadn’t spoken, I’d missed everything she’d tried to tell me.