—————————— MOM CARRIED A BIG BASKET OF French cookies into the rest home and dropped them at the front desk. A swarm of nurses appeared, as if someone had rung a bell, and stuffed handfuls of wrapped shortbread into their pockets, gobbled down meringues on the spot.
“That’ll be gone in five minutes,” Mom whispered to me with satisfaction. “This is how you get good service.”
She gestured to a nurse, as if to prove it, and asked her to help us. The nurse followed us with a smile and helped us move Halmoni into a wheelchair.
We pushed her chair into a courtyard. A cinderblock box full of spindly plants took up the center, and wooden trellises that might someday be wound by the bougainvillea creeping weakly up one side provided some shade. It was the kind of half-considered area that almost made me love the city: its lack of pretension, its lazy use of space. It beat sitting in her room.
Mom and I sat on the planter next to Halmoni. We’d wrapped a gray blanket around her lap and a second around her shoulders, even though the afternoon was still warm. Halmoni stared at a bee droning by until it moved out of her range of motion. Her eyes switched over to the struggling bougainvillea.
Halmoni disapproved, I imagined, of the neglected, papery flowers. When she babysat me, she’d spend all afternoon in the garden, squatting with her heels flat on the earth and tsking in disapproval at the lack of care Mom took with the aloe plants, the lemon tree, the tomato vines she’d planted. She tried to impart the basics to me instead, but, being a city kid, I was repulsed by the pale worms wriggling through the soil and complained about my sore legs after a few minutes of crouching. I once cut myself with a spade, and Halmoni didn’t go inside for the first aid kit but snapped an arm off the aloe plant and rubbed its gooey guts across the red scratch. I held up my finger, mesmerized, convinced that Halmoni came from some other planet.
Mom opened her big Goyard bag and took out a framed picture. In the photograph, she and her siblings and Halmoni were out to dinner. They were dressed up: Mom and my aunt in floral dresses, her brother in a blue dress shirt with a wide, seventies collar, Halmoni in pearls and red lipstick. A man in a brown suit sat to the right of Halmoni, grinning.
“I was going through some boxes in Halmoni’s apartment,” said Mom. “I thought I’d leave this with her.”
I pointed to the smiling man. “Who’s that?”
“Your haraboji,” said Mom.
The air stopped in my throat. Of course he was Mom’s father. He had the same round face and button nose. Haraboji: the branch that had split off of Mom’s stunted family tree, who had died somewhere in Korea sometime before I was born. All I knew about him fit into one breath: he was a kessuge, son of a bitch; he was an alcoholic; he was abusive—in short, Mom said, a typical Korean man. In the photograph, his face was swollen and pockmarked, presumably from years of Johnny Walker, and three of his teeth were gold.
“I thought you never saw him again after you left Korea,” I said.
“That’s mostly true.”
I didn’t, to my surprise, feel indignant at not knowing my grandfather’s face. I felt a sad clarity, like waking up after a pleasant dream to a cold morning. “You know,” I said quietly, “I always had this idea that one day I’d ask Halmoni about her life. And now that’s never going to happen.”
“You want to know?” said Mom, her jaw hardening.
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I did.
“I guess I should start in Korea,” said Mom, “around the time Haraboji was drinking and beating the crap out of Halmoni. I can still see the bruises on her face—all purple and yellow.”
Mom stared at nothing like some shaman readying a rite. It felt as if the floor were opening, lowering us into a pit. I braced myself as I strained to picture this ancient history—Korea, Halmoni’s bruised face, this strange man—that was not so long ago. Halmoni continued tracing the bougainvillea with her eyes.
“One day she left,” continued Mom. “Halmoni left Korea without telling any of us. I remember sitting on the stoop, crying and crying, wondering when she was coming home. How’s that for being a mother? Tuh,” she spat, as if answering herself. “Haraboji, meanwhile, was drinking and losing apartments. One time, he disappeared, probably to some mistress’s house, and we were evicted. So me and my siblings had to put all of our shit into a little cart and push it down the street, with nowhere to go. Then it snowed, and we started bawling.” Mom let out a sharp laugh. “We must’ve looked fucking pathetic.”
I sat on my hands and let my weight press them into the rough cinderblock, needing something hard to ground me. I couldn’t have forced a laugh if I tried.
“It took Halmoni a couple of years to save up the money to send for us. I don’t want to talk about that time,” Mom snapped, though I hadn’t asked. “I’ll never forget the day she finally sent a plane ticket to America. My uncle interrupted class, and everyone stared at me like I’d won a prize, passage to the beautiful country.
“Of course, we got here and Halmoni was working as some rich people’s maid. All she had was this tiny apartment in K-Town.”
“But you left Haraboji in Korea.”
“Yes.” Mom stared at the photo. “We assumed he’d drunk himself into a hole or gotten remarried. Then one day, years later, he showed up at our apartment in L.A. and knocked on the door during dinner, no warning, smiling like it was some big fucking reunion.
“Halmoni stood there and cussed him out: You kessuge, you alcoholic. But, of course, she let him in eventually.” Mom glared at Halmoni. “We went out to this big dinner that night. That’s where this photo is from. Haraboji spun all these stories about working for a Korean shipping company in Saudi Arabia, shaking hands with millionaires. Said he was rich. And you could see Halmoni’s mind running, making a shopping list. For a second, I think we believed all the bullshit. Like we were going to be a family.”
Mom rubbed the photograph’s frame with her thumbs. “I’m fuzzy on the details because I went back to Berkeley. I’d get these postcards from Halmoni: Paris, Madrid. Their second honeymoon. She was talking about sending your aunt to private school, moving to a big house on the Westside. Halmoni grew up rich, right, so she always expected that life to come back.
“Then, a few weeks later, she felt a lump on Haraboji’s throat. It was cancer. Halmoni wanted him to go to an American hospital, but Haraboji insisted the health care was better in Seoul, and he was a big man now with connections. So he flew back, checked into a hospital, and died. Halmoni only got the notice afterward. I don’t know if she spent more time crying or cussing out the kessuge.
“When she went to claim her part of the will, Haraboji’s sisters said, ‘What money? He was broke.’ So Halmoni used one thing she learned in America: she sued. She went back and forth to Korea looking for documents and hiring a private investigator to get all this money he supposedly had. But they painted her in court like the jealous widow, which, let’s be real, she was. In the end she got nothing.”
Mom stopped and the little courtyard was silent. The sun was setting and the light turned the stucco walls a dull blue. I noticed I’d been taking shallow breaths and felt dizzy. I let out a long exhale.
It was the most Mom had ever said of her life before America. No wonder she wanted to start her story the day she arrived, to sever everything that happened back there.
Mom held the photograph to Halmoni’s face. “Remember this dinner?”
Halmoni’s head jerked forward and her eyes went fiery. The monitor on her armrest beeped and a yellow light flashed. “Kessuge!” she spat, a dab of saliva forming at the center of her lips. Her neck strained, like she was ready to bite the picture in two. “Kessuge!” she rasped again, shredding the word in her throat.
Mom and I lurched back. The shrubs in the planter poked my neck.
I looked at Mom and we exchanged dumbfounded expressions. Then Mom’s eyes watered and she exploded into laughter. Her whole body shook, as if Halmoni had told some amazing joke. She heaved a breath so that she could howl with more laughing. A nurse poked her head into the courtyard but Mom shooed her away.
Finally, Mom wiped her tears, her shoulders trembling. “So much for leaving this photo by her bed. I think it would give Halmoni a heart attack.”
The monitor dinged again, then stopped. Halmoni settled back onto the wheelchair. Her eyes darted between us, as if asking what the joke was. I wiped my palms on my jeans. They were sweating.
Mom handed me the photo. “Since you want to know so much about your history.”
Haraboji smirked at me like a gargoyle. I thrust the frame back at Mom.
“I don’t want this.”
Mom glanced up in surprise. She took the photo gingerly.
“What the fuck,” I said. My head burned with a pressure pinching inside my skull. “I don’t see what’s funny. I don’t want this person’s face on my wall. What kind of abusive, patriarchal—”
Mom put her palm on my leg softly. “I’m only telling you because you asked,” she said.
“Not about this, though. I wanted family stories about activism, not stories of violence and worshiping money and lying.”
My eyes burned and I saw my immaturity but couldn’t manage anything else. Mom nodded and looked away, not out of coldness, but because this was a feeling I had to go through on my own.
We were silent as we wheeled Halmoni back to her room. I scooped her up by the shoulders as Mom lifted her legs. My grandmother’s bony back pressed against me, this delicate body that had survived her dog of a husband, my grandfather. We lay her down on the bed. I wanted to say goodbye, but her face was drained and soft, her eyes already closed.