—————————— I WALKED UP TO THE DINING ROOM table, energized from a heavy sleep. “It’s not that hard to get off academic probation,” I announced. “I’ll finish my degree.”
My parents stared at me with yogurt, berries, and the L.A. Times spread in front of them. Dad slumped back in relief and Mom eyed me.
“We think that’s a very good decision,” said Dad, trying not to appear too eager. “The revolution will be there when you finish.”
“I suppose if it came sooner,” I said, “that would be a good thing.”
He folded up his section and said he was off to work. He was wearing one of his identical gray suits that, when I stood to hug him, smelled like dust and my childhood. He walked out the door.
I sat down across from Mom and she faced me as if it were now time for business. Her stare was like a heat lamp, and I felt I’d catch flame if I didn’t speak.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. It came out as a croak and I cleared my throat to try again. “I wasn’t actually listening, the other day, about the Coalition. I was being arrogant, like I knew what you should’ve done.” Blood pulsed through my head, urging me on. “I really respect what you did under the circumstances. I have no idea what that took.”
Mom thrummed her fingers on the table. “I told you on the first day this wasn’t some lesson for your friends,” she said bluntly. “But you kept asking like I was supposed to have some perfect answer, like we knew what the fuck we were doing back then.”
“We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing, either,” I admitted. “Or at least, I don’t.”
We stared at each other, our limitations laid out before us as an invisible centerpiece.
“I remember what it was like to be in the middle of a campaign,” said Mom, “to stay on course no matter what.”
“Yeah, I’m not even doing that anymore. I just fought with Tiff about it.”
“You’ll be fine,” Mom scoffed. “The shit we went through back in the day? One time, I said something Bobby didn’t like at a meeting, and he came to my cubicle afterward and started yelling, What the fuck! You don’t know shit about this country, why don’t you learn some better English? I mean, screaming, with foam on his lips.
“I froze for a second. But you know your mother: after he finished I started screaming back: Fuck you! Don’t you ever talk to me like that! Everyone in the office peeked over their cubicles at me, because Bobby had gone off on everyone at some point and they were afraid of him.”
“Wow,” I said. The story doused all my warm images of their Black-Korean duo.
Mom shrugged. “After a while it became a routine. We’d scream at each other, get it all out, then laugh about it the next day.”
“That sounds healthy.”
“Who said it was healthy? Years later, he learned he had bipolar, and I went to therapy for my anger issues. But we didn’t have all that mental health language then. Anyway, with Koreans, you’re not really friends until you draw blood.” She said this as if it were a brag.
I managed a smile as I thought about the wound running up my leg.
Mom insisted on driving me to the airport and we loaded up the car. She took La Cienega, a name that means “the bog,” and I looked out the window at the urban swamp—the windowless Masonic temple and the Thai chicken place with its flaming logo and the lime-colored motel with a jumbo arrow pointing inside. The city’s ugliness made room for everything.
Mom nodded toward the back seat. “Last chance,” she said.
I turned around and saw Halmoni’s white box. I picked it up and held it in my lap. I was inheriting this teapot whether I wanted it or not. “Don’t be mad if I damage it with my reckless friends,” I said.
“Better to use it once and break it than to stash it away forever.”
I opened the box and on top of the teapot sat the photograph of Haraboji, looking up at me with his winner’s grin. I shut the lid as if trying to stopper a curse. “Is that a joke?”
“No,” said Mom. “You don’t have to put it above your bed or anything. But you should know where you come from.”
I gritted my teeth. “From an abuser and the woman who let him back into her life? Both of them obsessed with money and status?”
We stopped at a red light. Mom narrowed her lips. “You asked how I felt after Halmoni died and I couldn’t answer. It hit me, when I was talking to the abbess, that I don’t know if I ever saw Halmoni sad. Ever. Because if she had admitted her sadness, it would’ve taken over her life. So she never let it in.”
“And the abbess told you to feel it,” I said.
Mom nodded. “It made me remember how Halmoni grew up wealthy, how her family fled to Manchuria when the Japanese were fucking up Korea, and by the time the occupation was over they’d lost everything. So she believed that all she needed was a rich husband, or a successful daughter, or a lottery ticket, and she’d get her life back.
“And Haraboji—he was born in the North, then went south for his education. His parents sent money to an uncle to take care of him, but that uncle ran off with the money and the war broke out and America divided the country and Haraboji never saw his family again. So these angry, bitter, materialistic people—when you look at where they came from, why they were like that, it’s no wonder.”
I swallowed and my chest ached with a quiet, insistent pain. “So what?” I said. “We feel bad for them?”
Mom became very still and upright. “You know, Koreans have this word hwabyung, ‘burning sickness.’ It’s when you have so much anger, and it’s so repressed, that it destroys you. Halmoni would’ve rather held on to all her anger toward Haraboji, or me, or Korea, or America, than let go of her fantasy life. When I was an organizer, I was so good at tapping into that anger, getting up in front of people and stoking that fire in them. But then it made me sick, and L.A. burned, and I wondered what the hell it was for. I see the same anger in you, Reed, this feeling like everything in the world is wrong. I see it eating you.”
“We have reasons to be angry,” I said.
“Of course we do,” said Mom. “But you can’t go back and change things. You can’t ask for a different life.”
That was what I wanted, though. What else was the revolution but to go backward and forward at once, to build a future so different that it undid the past? And if we didn’t have that, then all we had was the present—this family and country, this life, exactly as they were.
I heard a ragged, wheezing sound. It was my own throat, gasping against the constriction in my chest.
“Honey?” Mom asked in a worried voice.
I pushed the button to open the window. “Just need some air.”
“Reed,” Mom said, on the edge of worry and impatience. The car swerved and stopped. She thumped me on the back with the heel of her hand. “Inhale, exhale.”
I closed my eyes and placed my palm against my heart and felt that swelling again, pushing outward. But if I cracked it open a hairbreadth, I feared it would flood me.
I let go of my heart and focused on inhaling and exhaling, as if my lungs had forgotten what to do, and I needed to teach them.
Mom turned back onto the road. “Keep breathing. We have time before your flight.” I heard the nervousness underneath the command. She continued down La Cienega then exited onto a side street. The concrete and stores disappeared. Eucalyptus trees swayed over the road and their sharp, medicinal smell came through the windows. I breathed in more deeply. The road ended in a parking lot that served some scrubby, desert hills.
“Not more exercise,” I said weakly.
“You’ve got to move it out,” Mom said firmly.
I didn’t have any argument left and followed Mom onto the hiking path. The cement gave way to dirt, and chalky puffs rose around our feet. Prickly bushes with waxy leaves grew out of the sandy earth—plants designed not to be pretty but to retain all the moisture they could in the cruel desert. The incline was enough to make my heart beat faster.
“Better?” asked Mom.
I nodded.
“Reed. What’s going on?”
I didn’t know what to say and who I’d be once I said it, but I knew I had to speak. “I wanted to create this perfect version of myself,” I said. “To be this ideal radical. Because if I could do that, then other people could, too, and we could change the world. Now I come here and find out all this pain I’ve inherited from generations, from Halmoni and Haraboji, from the war, the Japanese. Not just our family, but all these Koreans who were abused, then returned that abuse here. Of course they were neocolonizers extracting resources from South Central, of course they climbed onto their rooftops with guns during Sa-i-gu. That’s what they knew. Same with these pro-Liang Chinese pouring out: they feel misunderstood, they’ve never had an outlet to talk about all the humiliation they’ve endured until now.
“And so now we’re just supposed to live inside these forces, these cycles of violence, that we barely understand? That move us around like puppets?” A simple, inane desire came up. “I wish I could cut it all away.”
“Yes,” said Mom. “But if you did that, who would you be?”
The words hovered around us and I had no answer. The pressure inside me had lightened and I kept following Mom, a step at a time, listening to our feet crunch and slide on the rocky path.
The trail rose along the ridge and we saw the Inglewood oil fields again. The hammerheaded pumpjacks dipped up and down, the silent beasts tearing up the earth, trapped in their dumb labor. It was a brutality that we’d come too far to renounce, and so instead we compromised, driving our fuel-efficient vehicle. We wanted to repair this torn earth and failed and failed and tried anyway.
Mom swung her arms as if to let go of whatever was building in her. “I never wanted to be a mother, you know. After what I grew up with.” She spoke softly, and something between a smile and grimace broke across her face. “I digitized our home movies a couple months ago, from that old camcorder. I sat there one night and watched them all: Dad giving you your first bath; you in your Superman pajamas, dancing around the living room; you at your first preschool, singing ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ You all sounded terrible, so out of tune.
“I sat there and I cried the whole way. Then I watched them again. I cried because I could never have imagined giving birth to someone like that—so untouched by the world. That’s when I knew there was something magic that all our politics and theories couldn’t explain. That you could come from me.”
Mom shuddered, coming back to herself. “Maybe I’m projecting too much happiness onto you. Maybe your crazy-ass mother fucked it up. But at least you know I tried, right? I tried to give you what I didn’t have.”
A barrier inside me collapsed. It had taken all my life to hear this simple confession, to understand what Mom risked in the primal act of carrying my body in hers. I’d wanted an answer to my questions, wanted to dispel the ghosts of history with the right politics. But the answer wasn’t a theory. The answer was my life.
“I know,” I said. “You did.”
We came to the crest of a hill and stopped. Mom looked up at the powder-blue sky. It faded into a haze at the horizon, and L.A. spread out in every direction, flat and boxy, until cut by the long turquoise arm of the Pacific. A trail of white planes rose in clean lines over the water until they banked toward their destinations.
I looked over at Mom. Her eyes were watering. I blinked. Mine were too. I blinked again and the sun streaked through my tears, the city dissolved into a blur.
“Thank you,” said Mom. She reached over to pat my face, and for once, I didn’t dodge. “My son.”
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